


A Small Kingdom

by xpityx



Series: Witcher Fics [11]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25001398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xpityx/pseuds/xpityx
Summary: “I have another joke,” Jaskier informed them, and Yen mimed falling off her horse while Geralt tried to keep a straight face.-A fairytale, but not the one it seems to be.
Relationships: Emhyr var Emreis/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Witcher Fics [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732639
Comments: 144
Kudos: 316





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Slumberoustrash](https://slumberoustrash.tumblr.com/) for beta'ing and to Kit for taking time out of their busy schedule to do a sensitivity read.
> 
> T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶'̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶w̶e̶e̶k̶ ̶(̶a̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶m̶y̶s̶e̶l̶f̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶B̶o̶o̶k̶,̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶a̶n̶f̶i̶c̶)̶.̶ All posted! Still not finished Book! >.<  
> -
> 
> I wrote this as a way to comfort myself during these difficult times and I hope it brings you some measure of the same.

_We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss._

Paulo Coelho

“I have another joke,” Jaskier informed them, and Yen mimed falling off her horse while Geralt tried to keep a straight face.

“Go on,” Geralt encouraged.

In his experience, it was best to get it over with—if left to his own devices Jaskier would spend half an hour in build-up.

“What did the fisherman say to the Gwent player?”

“I don’t know, what did the fisherman say to the Gwent player?” Yen asked in a monotone.

“Pick a cod, any cod.”

There was a short silence wherein Jaskier gradually deflated, eyebrows beetling and his shoulders rounding.

“That was terrible,” Geralt told him. He was hoping that honesty would eventually convince Jaskier to stop telling jokes, but no luck as of yet.

The jokes were a result of being nearly two months on the road as they made their way to the old capital of Nilfgaard, some 2,000 miles south of Cintra.

The Emperor would have everyone believe that Miatlas has always been the capital but he had moved the whole city some thirty miles to the east not long after he had come to power. Even the Golden Tower had been moved, brick by golden brick. Some said he moved it out of vanity, and some said it was because the city was cursed when the Emperor had murdered his predecessor and taken the crown. What everyone agreed on was that it was the only place on the Continent where Watchers were unable to sense those they hunted.

“Okay, one more. This is the last one, I swear it.”

“Holy fuck,” Geralt swore, half under his breath.

“What did the green grape say to the purple grape?”

No-one replied this time, but Roach snorted and Jaskier seemed to take that as encouragement enough.

“Breathe, you idiot! Breathe!”

“I cannot believe people pay you money to perform songs you have written,” Yen told him.

“I admit that my jokes lack the skilled, poetic resonance of my lyrics, but I do think that you and Geralt here are simply deficient in a decent sense of humour.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yen replied. At this point, Geralt found it safer to just sit back and watch. “I laughed for a whole five minutes yesterday.”

“ _At me!_ Because I slipped in some horse shit! That’s not a sense of humour, that’s a lack of intellect!” 

Geralt slowed Roach a little: just enough to be out of fireball range. Yen only bared her teeth though, undoubtedly thinking of the price on their heads and the necessity of keeping a low profile. 

He had never been this far south but Jaskier had, and it had been his idea to make a fairly speedy run for the old city. With any luck, in a six-month or so, their wanted posters would have faded enough for them to venture onto the road again. It hadn’t even been anything in particular that had led to their reward being increased, they had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They had enough coin from their last contract to keep them in clothing and food for a while, but it’d be tight. Better hungry than dead.

They’d had one or two close calls along the way. In Ebbing, they’d ridden close enough to the pyres for the sickly smell of burning flesh to reach them. Yen had said nothing; had only pulled her hood up and rode in stony silence until the air had cleared. 

By the time they had gotten to the Alba river, Jaskier was doing almost all their talking for them. Geralt was too easily marked as a Witcher and this deep into Nilfgaardian lands they dared not risk even the lightest of glamours. Yen’s accent and beauty marked her as out of place, but Jaskier spoke fluent Nilfgaard, and more than once he had stopped anyone from asking too many questions by simply distracting them with his fine voice and song. 

The roads leading in and out of Darn Ruach would be too crowded for their safety, so they cut across land, hoping the dry summer would mean they could find a place to ford. They were less than a day’s ride from the river when Geralt spotted a cloud of dust on the road ahead of them.

“Got company,” he warned the others, pulling his hood up. It was too damn hot to be riding around in a cloak, but Geralt doubted he’d be able to get away with the black modesty veil Yen had worn for the last hundred miles or so. 

The land was flat farmland with no cover for miles, so they stayed their course and hoped it was simply a convoy heading to Winneburg or some other city. If it was a convoy it was a large one: Geralt could feel the rhythm of many hooves hitting the earth as they got closer and the wavering lines of the carts solidified into something far taller than a cart or a carriage. 

“It’s a pyre,” Geralt said, flatly, when they were still a mile out.

There was a chance there were Watchers themselves accompanying it to whatever place was to be next cursed with its presence: using magic to hide themselves was a greater risk than carrying on and hoping they were not sensed or recognised. Jaskier slung his lute around and began to pluck out an unobtrusive tune. His hands shook only a little. 

“Can you see any?” Yen asked in an undertone. They were much too far out to hear her yet, but the long shadow of the structure being wheeled towards them encouraged whispers.

Geralt shook his head, and it was only when they were almost upon them did he let out the breath he had been holding: there were no Watchers in their long robes, only the rust and iron of the pyre, eight horses sweating in the heat as they pulled their heavy burden.

The horses laboured past, Geralt turning his head at the stench of fear and exhaustion coming off them. He doubted they’d all make it to their destination. Behind them, great iron wheels stamped with the Watcher’s eye turned slowly in the dusty road. Curved ribs of blackened metal formed a cradle for the wood and coal that fuelled it, and struts to bind the condemned to thrust upwards into the blue sky. 

He hadn’t believed it when he’d first heard of them: why would anyone make a movable pyre when you could just build one easily enough wherever you were? Then he’d seen one, and understood. Jaskier had spoken about symbols and their importance enough for Geralt to know one when he saw one: the pyres moved from city to city with all the roving terror of a necrophage horde. 

Two women and a man were chained to the back of this one, their feet dragging tiredly in the dirt. Only the man held his head up: richly dressed, his doublet had fine jewels sewn into the collar though he seemed to have lost his hat along the way. The women both wore simple dresses. One was perhaps Jaskier’s age, and the other was bent and wrinkled, her hands frozen into swollen-knuckled claws. Midwives, Geralt guessed. The man could be a mage, or he could be a local merchant who had simply pissed off the wrong person. 

They were all bound for the fires, nevertheless. Fires that had been consuming life and knowledge for the last twenty years or so and showed no signs of slowing. 

Geralt, Yen and Jaskier rode past, Jaskier calmly humming his tune and Geralt and Yen with their faces covered as best they could. 

“That was close,” Jaskier commented, once they were a mile or so away. “What is it?” he added to Yen. She hadn’t said or done anything, but they knew each other well enough to recognise each other’s silences.

“How far to the Capital?” she asked.

“About another 150 miles, why?”

“We should ride hard.”

“What do you think we’ve been doing for the last 2,000 miles?” Geralt asked.

“Again, why?”

“I arranged matters so that the pyre will collapse shortly, I think we should be far away when that happens.”

Geralt groaned and kicked Roach into a tired canter.

They could not change the whole world, only live in it as best they could. 

They rode on. 

  
  


Geralt tried not to gape too obviously at the size of the Capital. 

It sprawled outward in wave after wave of concentric, crumbling streets, stretching away across the horizon. The surrounding fields had gone to seed and wild wheat and cowslip grew over the edges of the roads that led to the city, eating away great gouts of paving stone so that in places they had to ride single file. The march of time only became more obvious as they rode into the city proper, where vines grew out of every window and the silence lay thick over dusty stone. 

Geralt caught glimpses of people here and there, the flash of movement as they turned a corner or the sound of running footsteps a few streets over. He wasn’t surprised at the lack of welcome: anyone hiding out in the ruins of the city was likely hiding for the same reason they had ridden down half the continent. 

By silent agreement they continued onto the palace that dominated the city: its ivy-covered walls still stood proud while the moat was thick with silt. 

“Jaskier, who told you the city was magically null?” Yen asked as the outer walls of the palace loomed above them.

“I’m not sure someone specifically told me, but I know of a few friends of friends who successfully evaded Watchers here for a time. There’s even a song about it: _down to the city where the magic never flows, I took myself and all my woes, safe from the Emperor’s wrath_. I have never sung it because I value my skin, but it was plenty popular a few years ago.”

“Well, whoever wrote it was an idiot,” Yen said. “The city is bathed in magics.”

“Then why don’t the Watchers come here?” Geralt asked. 

No-one had an answer.

The palace itself was… odd. Geralt couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but as they got closer he caught a glimpse now and again of an imposing glory, not the ruined wreck it clearly was. He didn’t mention it to the others, but he could tell Yen could see or sense something, as she looked at the remains of it with the kind of intense concentration she reserved for magics and sarcastic rejoiners.

“Yen?” he said as they got to what remained of the first retaining wall, and his medallion jumped against his skin.

“I don’t know,” she replied, still studying the palace. “It feels immensely powerful, but I can’t _see_ anything.”

They reached the stone tunnel that would lead them further which revealed the first clear sign of a spell: less than four or five stones remained on either side of the arch, grown over with vines, yet it stood proud and tall, seemingly unaffected by the lack of anything holding it up. 

Geralt eyed the keystone warily. On either side of it were only spindly vines, with the odd white flower. If it fell, Geralt would rather be elsewhere when it did.

“I’m sure that’s not how the laws of nature work,” Jaskier commented, staring up at the arch—as they all were.

“I vote for Jaskier to go first, as this whole journey was his idea,” Yen said.

“I said ‘let’s ride down to the Capital, no Watcher would be able to find us there.’ Not ‘let’s go to the Capital and ride into an accident waiting to happen.’”

“It’s a ruined palace, of course you want to go in there! You once made us go into a haunted mausoleum so you could write a song about it!” Yen accused.

“It was a crypt, actually, and how was I to know it was haunted?”

Geralt sighed and spurred Roach forwards, under the shadow of the impossible stone. 

The tunnel was dark, and the small witchlight that Yen had conjured only served to cast deeper shadows in front of Geralt. He thought perhaps it was blocked at the other end, and was about to turn to Yen to tell her they’d have to go back, when a bright circle of light appeared as if they’d turned a corner.

A few more steps and they were out, squinting in the sunlight. 

Geralt stared. 

If he’d made a wish to a Genie, it could not have produced a more beautiful garden.

“These are lilac hana,” Jaskier said, wonder in his voice as he touched a delicate flower that grew high enough to reach from his horse. “They don’t grow anywhere south of the Yaruga river. What are they doing here?” 

“And valerian and lotus flowers,” Yen added, staring around her, a frown on her face.

Geralt had had no idea he’d been travelling with a couple of botanists for all these years. His own knowledge of flora extended to which ones you could grind up and kill what with. 

“So, we’re thinking magic?” he said, and Yen snorted.

“Good gods, was that a joke?” Jaskier asked. 

Geralt ignored him, dismounting from Roach and leading her further into the gardens. He hadn’t thought palaces would have such a thing: the area surrounding a palace was a defence the same as the walls and the moat. This pleasant riot of colour and butterflies could not be what it seemed. 

There were what had probably once been manicured hedges lining the side of the garden, but beyond that it was chaos: foxgloves and larkspur and lily of the valley tangled together in a sea of plants and flowers Geralt couldn’t even guess at. A few patches of mossy grass remained here and there, inviting and soft, which meant they were probably anything but. Geralt gave them a wide berth, leading Roach towards the other end of the garden. 

The palace itself was huge: the overgrown courtyard stood between two wings that flared out from the central entrance, where a double-height door stood open, leaning drunkenly on its hinges. There were no stables to be seen, or any other outbuilding Geralt would expect to see such as guard houses and the like. 

Yen went in first, her magics like a cloak around her, followed by Jaskier, then Geralt. They left the horses to wander the courtyard as they were unlikely to attempt the dark of the tunnel without the encouragement of their riders so couldn’t go far.

Shafts of green and yellow light that crossed each other on the dust floor from coloured glass at the uppermost reaches of the grand entrance. Carved wooden benches were pushed against the walls, interspersed with ornate chairs, their cushioned backs wet with dew and moss.

Jaskier stood in the middle and did a slow turn, taking in the room. Geralt watched him for a moment before directing his attention downwards: there were footprints in the dust: one small set and one larger. Someone had tracked dirt in from outside and a small posy of flowers, tied with ribbon, lay abandoned near the door. 

“These are recent,” Geralt commented, pointing to the tracks that lead further into the palace.

“A child?” Yen asked.

“Looks like.”

“Probably one of the folk from the city, hiding out here for reasons similar to our own.”

There were plenty of things that would use such tricks to lure humans in, but Yen and Jaskier tended towards eye-rolling when Geralt gave them perfectly useful information about the many monsters that infested the world, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

“Onwards, noble friends?” Jaskier asked.

He gave a courtly bow to Yen, who demonstrated said eye-rolling skills before leading them to the door at the opposite end of the hall. 

A corridor, narrower than he would have expected, branched both left and right, with doors leading off it every ten feet or so. The dust was thicker here, and the footprints more pronounced, though they led in no particular direction. 

“This would go faster if we split up,” Jaskier suggested. Geralt turned to him to tell him what an idiotic idea that was to find him trying to hide a smile. 

“Too easy,” Yen told Jaskier, and Geralt scowled at both of them.

“Fine, you two go that way, I’ll go this way,” Geralt said, gesturing first to the right, then left.

“Geralt, I was joking,” Jaskier told him, which Geralt knew, but he felt like being contrary. It was only an overgrown building, after all—perhaps with some poor soul hiding from them like the rest of the inhabitants had. 

“No, let’s leave him to his sulk,” Yen announced. She threaded her arm through Jaskier’s and led him down the long corridor, away from Geralt. 

  
  


The walls in the hallways were overgrown with cypress vine, and the air was thick with the scent of its flowers. Geralt’s armour was covered in smears of orange pollen, and when he stepped out of the sun they looked like blood. The walls were closer here, and the air was damp. Dead plant matter made the flagstones under his feet slippery, and more than once he stepped into mulch up to his ankles where one was simply gone. 

Most of the doors that led off the hallway had expanded to stick in their frames, but a good kick got them loose. One had splintered into a dusty pile of firewood, showing the empty room beyond: nothing but a few mouldering books scattered on the floor. Vines hung thickly over a bookcase in the back of the room which Geralt shredded with a quick Aard. Yet the bookcase was bare, and Geralt wondered if whoever owned the footprints they’d seen had also emptied these rooms. It was also possible that they’d been packed and taken from the Palace when the Capital was officially moved, but there was some sense of hurried abandonment about the place that made Geralt doubt it. 

He’d never paid much attention to the swirling rumours around the movement of the Capital but, despite the growing flowers and the slow decay, it felt like something calamitous had happened there: like an unquiet grave. 

He decided to go back to the others after a few more rooms. They’d be better exploring all together, even though Yen was more than capable of taking care of herself—and Jaskier—if necessary. Not that Jaskier was helpless: he kept a pair of knives in his boots that he’d been able to throw with startling accuracy before Geralt had ever thought to offer to teach him how to defend himself. 

He turned in the narrow space, and reaching red flowers brushed against his shoulders, releasing a blanket of sweet scent into the air. Geralt put a hand over his nose to stop the sneeze that threatened. But it was no use, and he sneezed three times in quick succession: eyes shut and hoping nothing decided to take his moment of distraction to try to take a bite out of him. 

He opened his eyes and focused abruptly on the vine-covered stone in front of him.

He turned around, and sure enough, the narrow passage continued behind him, but the way back was no longer there: just a wall of cypress vine, softly swaying in the breeze.

“Fuck.”

He was never going to live this down. 

After debating blowing the whole thing up he decided that it would be simpler just to find another exit. Jaskier would undoubtedly make up a song about if he got trapped in a hallway in broad daylight, then brought the palace down on top of them while trying to get out. 

Humming a dwarven mining song to himself, Geralt walked in the only direction available: further in. 

A room branched off the hallway on his left that seemed to contain nothing but a stone staircase, reaching down into the dark below. He went halfway down, but it was only an empty room—the entrance to the cellars must be somewhere else. 

He went back out to the hallway which opened up onto a wide cloister, a fountain visible through the arches. Here too, flowers flowed over the lip of the fountain and down to what would have been manicured grass. Now the glasses grew tall enough to hide a dozen necrophages. Wading in, he listened carefully for any movement. There was nothing, and the lip of the fountain crumbled sadly when he leant against it for a moment. The whole place was a ruin, on the edge of collapse and complete with changing hallways. He’d be glad to collect Yen and Jaskier and get out of there, just as soon as he found his way back to them. 

He shielded his eyes against the sun overhead and looked up to what he could see of the roof. There was only one more storey, and he thought the tiles looked intact enough to hold his weight should he not be able to find the exit again. 

He went back to the cloister, following it past a kitchen with a fireplace as tall as he was and then an echoing chapel, a tapestry of the great sun on one wall. He took a door at random on his right, entering a small room that might have been pleasant, once. Now the furniture was black in places with damp and a rat scurried past him, entering a sizeable hole in the wall. He kept an eye on the door behind him, in case it should change in the same way the hallway had, but it remained where it was: tilted on its hinges. The next door led to another courtyard and a further kitchen. Geralt wondered how many kitchens one household needed as he entered the next room, which was a long, oblong shape, and whose purpose was not immediately clear. He decided to retrace his steps but when he turned the door behind him was gone: just wood panelling and wallpaper so faded it was grey. 

Geralt sighed. 

He bet Yen and Jaskier had found the wine cellar and were drinking hundred-year vintages while he was stuck on the other side of a rotting building that didn’t seem to like him very much. 

He turned back to the room and stopped short, unnerved for the first time. He was sure the wall was closer than it had been.

The hairs on the back of his arms stood up, and his medallion vibrated. Without looking, he knew the wall behind him was only centimetres from where he stood.

He cast Quen and drew his sword.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, it's Tuesday here...

He was wrong about the wine cellar, but not about the comparative pleasantness of their afternoon: Jaskier and Yen were lying in a mossy patch of grass out in the main courtyard eating apples when he joined them. Geralt flopped down next to them, wiping some of the dust and sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. 

“Wow,” Jaskier said. “Did you trip?”

Geralt gave him a filthy look then stole his half-eaten apple and took a bite. 

“Seriously, did you find something?” Yen asked.

“No. My wing of the palace just didn’t seem to like me much: tried to flatten me.”

There was a silence while Geralt ate the rest of his apple.

“Well, we have more bad news,” Jaskier informed him. “We can’t get out.”

“What do you mean?”

“We mean,” Yen replied, taking the core of the apple from him and throwing it over her shoulder, “that the exit has disappeared in our absence and while you were falling down some stairs or what have you, we walked the entire boundary of the estate and were unable to find another one.” 

“Well, we were hoping to stay awhile, right?” Jaskier asked. 

“Not in the palace itself,” Yen said. 

“How were you able to walk the whole boundary? I was gone perhaps twenty minutes.”

“You were gone nearly two hours, we were just about to send Roach in to look for you.”

Geralt snorted. “Well, thank you for your concern.”

He climbed to his feet, already looking towards the tunnel where they had come into the courtyard. Even from here, he could see that the boundary wall seemed smooth and uninterrupted. And tall. He didn’t remember it being quite so tall when they arrived. 

“I’m going to have a look,” he added.

“Why?” Yen demanded. “Because your sorcery is so much better than mine?”

He shrugged, conceding the point, but he had to at least look.

“Try not to fall on your face!” Jaskier called out, helpfully. 

Not only was the entrance gone, but there was no hint of the tunnel they had come through. There was even an overgrown hedge there, looking for all the world as old and all the others. The kind of magic needed to accomplish such a feat would leave a mark: a sense, a smell—something. But there was nothing other than the background magic of the place, which could easily be explained by whatever catastrophe had originally befallen it. 

Geralt, hoping neither and Yen or Jaskier were watching him, leaned into the bush to push at the wall where the tunnel had been. 

Nothing.

The stone was warm by the afternoon sun and Geralt leant back, pulling himself free of where sharp branches had hooked on his clothing. Something—some thought—tugged at him, but he couldn’t quite find what had snagged his attention. He shook his head: it would come back to him if it was important. 

“The horses are fine,” Geralt reported. 

“Good,” Jaskier said. He loved Galla, the stupidly expensive stallion that he’d won in a game of Gwent some four years ago.

“Where did you get the apples from?” he asked, thinking that the horses would be pleased to have some. 

“There’s trees growing in the courtyard with the fountain,” Jaskier told him.

“The one with the cloisters around it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” He certainly didn’t remember seeing any trees and, while it had been overgrown, it hadn’t been _that_ overgrown.

“Yes, we’re sure - the palace isn’t that big,” Yen said. 

Sure enough, when they went back to the courtyard there were three apple trees, overflowing with fruit: green erolas, and red morindas.

“Huh,” Jaskier said, reaching for a morinda. 

“What?”

“Apple trees aren’t compatible with themselves, they have to pollinate with a different tree.”

“So?” Geralt asked, putting two green erolas in each pocket.

“There’s only one morinda tree here.”

Yen, who had been investigating the fountain, looked up in a way that made them both freeze in readiness for whatever she had sensed.

“It’s May,” she said.

Geralt looked at Jaskier to see if he could explain, but he seemed equally shocked.

“And?” Geralt prompted them.

“Apples, in general, don’t grow in May, and certainly not these types.”

“Maybe they’re confused,” he suggested.

“Apple trees have more brain cells than you appear to, so it’s unlikely,” Yen told him.

Geralt would have usually sniped right back, but the thought that had been itching at the back of his mind suddenly bloomed, fully formed.

“You said I was gone for two hours, but when I came back out the sun had hardly moved.” 

“Time moves differently here,” Yen realised, glancing warily at the palace.

“But that’s impossible,” Geralt countered, despite all the evidence to the contrary. “You’d need something like a portal for there to be different pockets of time, and I think we would have noticed the howling circle of chaos in the middle of one of the corridors.”

“Okay, perhaps we should discuss the terribly powerful magic we can’t sense _outside_ the palace proper, eh?” Jaskier suggested. 

They did move back to the outer courtyard, Geralt making sure Jaskier was between him and Yen as they did so. Jaskier gave him a look that said he knew what Geralt was doing, but didn’t protest. Magic was an enemy that Jaskier, for all his skills with his words and his knives, had little to counter. 

“Do you think we shouldn’t have eaten the apples?” Jaskier asked Yen, once they had checked on the horses and were again sitting in the soft grass near to where the entrance had been. Geralt wasn’t certain, but he thought that the outer walls had grown another millimetre or two in their absence. 

“Well, look at it this way,” she replied. “You ate one first, so if something does happen at least I’ll have some warning.

“Well we did need more magic, there might even be enough background magic here to hide your ego,” Jaskier said, cheerfully.

The look she gave him could have seared skin from bone. They might snipe at each other, but there was love there: Yen risked the fires to put a strong glamour on Jaskier so he wouldn’t have to bind his breasts every day.

Geralt voiced his agreement once Yen had toned down her glare a little: then the sheer power at the centre of the Capital currently worked to their advantage. 

They’d come all this way so they’d be safe from Watchers and their pyres, but he half thought they might have found the _reason_ for the pyres. The Emperor had always been strident in his hatred of non-humans, but it had only been in the last twenty years or so that Watch Towers had started to appear. First, it had been the midwives and hedge witches that had slowly disappeared, but it wasn’t until they came for Yen one day that it was clear that no-one was safe. As far as they knew, Yen was the last of her School to survive. Jaskier had been travelling with them for over a decade: he’d just appeared one day and never left. It wasn’t safe on the road for anyone alone any more, even a handful of Witchers had disappeared into a Tower and never come out again. He’d never heard of a Witcher on a pyre, and feared it was because some of those who now wore the dun-coloured robes of a Watcher and hunted down people to be burned alive had once walked the Trials.

Maybe this place was the reason for those burnings, for that treachery.

He shared his thoughts on the palace with Yen and Jaskier, who agreed, but didn’t see how it made much difference: they had come to lay low, not to be swallowed by a pile of cursed stones. 

  
  
  


Evening was setting in, and they agreed to leave the palace and its secrets to the morning at least. 

Geralt hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He was inclined to think it was some effect of this place, as falling asleep on watch duty wasn’t one of his habits: he wouldn’t have lived long if it had been. 

He was even more surprised to see a man sitting on a bench a few feet away. A bench that most definitely hadn’t been there when he fell asleep. Geralt thought he was a statue at first, but then his ears caught up with his eyes and he realised that he could hear him breathing. It was too dark to see whether he was looking their way or not but it was unlikely he’d missed the three travellers sleeping in an untidy pile in his front garden. Geralt got up, careful not to wake the others, and walked over to the newly-appeared bench. 

The moon was waning, but the stars were bright enough to show the strong features of the man as he approached him. He was as pale as Geralt was, and was striking more than handsome: a man in his prime with a proud nose and long black hair, braided back from his face. He held himself with the kind of confidence usually found in the very rich or the very stupid—or more usually, both—and his clothing was some decades away from current fashions, for all that they were well dyed and sewn. 

“Good evening,” the man said, his accent pure Nilfgaard.

“Evening,” Geralt replied.

He sat on the bench a few inches from the stranger. He startled then, but only slightly.

“I find myself a little at a loss,” he continued, and Geralt could see that he was looking into the distance. 

“Yeah?”

He turned, and his gaze was piercing. 

“The house will not let you leave, but I have no desire for you to stay.”

Geralt huffed a laugh. He was an aristocrat for sure, only someone so rich could look at the palace behind them and think _house_.

“It would be difficult indeed to keep either myself or Yen where we don’t want to be, and where we go, Jaskier goes too.”

The man turned back to the stars.

“You will understand, soon enough,” he said, and then said no more. 

Geralt must have dozed off again, as when Yen touched his knee and told him she was taking her watch, the man was gone and Geralt was curled up on a patch of moss where the bench had been. He opened his mouth to tell Yen about the strange encounter, but something more immediate occurred to him.

“Where’s Jaskier?”

“I don’t know. He was gone when I woke up because _someone_ forgot to wake me for my watch.”

Geralt got up, ignoring her complaint and cupped his hands to his mouth.

“Jaskier!”

Yen flinched and leaned away from him.

“Warn me perhaps?”

“Jaskier!” Geralt yelled again. 

“His jacket was still warm when I got up, he can’t have been gone long. How much trouble do you think he can get into in five minutes?” 

Geralt gave her an incredulous look and she seemed to consider her words.

“Jaskier!” she shouted, just as Jaskier himself wandered out of the front entrance, munching an apple.

“Don’t wander off eh?” Geralt requested when he reached them.

Jaskier folded himself gracefully into a sitting position on the grass.

“Why-ever not? The most dangerous creature we’ve seen so far is the butterflies.”

“You remember the part where the walls tried to kill me yesterday? And that we have misplaced the exit?”

Jaskier shrugged, and strummed a few notes of his lute. Geralt gave up and sat down, Yen joining them.

“Maybe the palace only wants to eat you,” she suggested. 

“Speaking of eating, I saw a deer just now.”

Geralt and Yen looked at him, but he was fiddling with his lute.

“A deer?” Geralt prompted.

“Oh? Yes, lovely thing. Just wandered right past me.”

Yen opened her mouth to reply, but Geralt suddenly remembered the man he had seen in the night and startled.

“What is it? Why are you twitching?” Yen demanded.

“I saw a man last night, spoke to him,” he replied, and then described the strange encounter with as much detail as he could remember. “I can’t believe I forgot,” he finished.

There was a silence while Jaskier and Yen shared a knowing look.

“What?”

“And what colour were his eyes?” Yen asked.

“Brown—why…? Oh, fuck off. I’m a Witcher, I was _made_ to be observant!”

Jaskier strummed a few notes and began to sing.

“ _Oh his aristocrat air, and he spoke with such flair! And our love came so quick when I sat on his—_ Ow! You can’t go around pinching people, Geralt!”

“Look,” Geralt grated out. “Do you not think it’s at least worthy of some investigation?”

“We told you,” Yen sighed. “Jaskier and I toured the whole palace, or what’s left of it, while you got lost in the first hallway you came to.”

“I did not—” Geralt took a deep breath, then tried again. “Can we at least do something other than admire the butterflies today?”

“Of course, I’m going to walk the boundary line again, and if I can’t find a way out I’m going to _make_ one.”

Some three hours later they decided to instead go see if they could find the deer again, so at least they’d be trapped with venison. 

They followed Jaskier through the palace to the west rear courtyard, which led to a small garden that suggested angular beds of flowers under the thick grass that grew everywhere. 

Geralt stopped so abruptly that Jaskier ploughed into him, bouncing back a few steps.

“I can hear footsteps,” he said, before Jaskier could say anything.

He drew a dagger and Yen gathered magics close to her, ready to use at a moment’s notice as they moved carefully to a corner where the stone curved back on itself. Geralt stepped out first, Yen at his shoulder. Geralt stood, his dagger loose in his hand as Jaskier came around them both to stand a little in front of him.

A teenaged, silver-haired girl, laughed suddenly as she dived towards a small bird in the grass. The noise startled the bird into flight and it flew straight up and over the wall. The girl watched it go, the laughter gone from her expression. 

Geralt stared.

“Good morning!” Jaskier called. 

Geralt turned his stare onto him.

“ _What the fuck are you doing?_ ” he whispered, urgently.

“I’m going to ask this nice young lady what she is doing in a cursed palace, while you-” Jaskier poked him just above his breastbone “-stay here and mutter to yourself about traps or whatever you think this is.”

Geralt opened his mouth then closed it again. 

“Fine!” he told Jaskier’s back. 

He could feel Yen’s amusement at him without looking at her, and he crossed his arms over his chest, but stayed where he was while first Jaskier and then Yen went over to talk to the girl. The breeze picked up, whipping their words away from them before they could reach Geralt, but by their gestures, they seemed to be making introductions. 

Presently, the girl came over to Geralt, her bright blue eyes full of curiosity. 

“My name is Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon var Emreis,” she said, with a half curtsy and Geralt tried very hard not to visibly startle at the dead Emperor’s name.

“Geralt of Rivia.”

“I’ve never met a Witcher before.”

Geralt rolled his eyes. Jaskier had to tell everyone he thought safe enough to do so that he travelled with an actual Witcher.

“How old are you?” Geralt asked. 

“I’m 13.”

“And how long have you been 13?” he asked. 

Ciri regarded him with narrowed eyes. 

“You’re clever, I can see why you’ve not earned any favour around here. And you destroyed the West Serving Room,” she added.

“Well, it tried to destroy me first.”

She nodded, as if that was fair.

“Master Jaskier said you came through a tunnel.”

“Yes.”

“And that you would show me.”

Geralt flicked his eyes away from the girl for a moment—if that’s what she was—to where Jaskier and Yen were ambling back to him. 

“We can all go,” he suggested. 

The girl, Cirilla, led the way, walking at a sedate pace and glancing at Geralt from time to time. She stepped through to the great hall with Geralt just behind her, but the door, which had been nothing but a woodwormed mess the last time he had seen it, closed in front of him with a solid sounding thump. 

By the time they got it open again, she was gone. 

  
  


“Geralt, what are you going to do? Cut through the wall?” Jaskier asked, hurrying after him as Geralt headed for the place where the entrance had been.

“My swords got me out of the room that tried to kill me, they can get me out of this ridiculous place.”

“We’re trying not to call attention to ourselves, remember? We voted and everything! No excessive use of magics, no excessive use of Witcher strength, no excessive use of my manly wiles.” 

“I haven’t used a fireball in years,” Yen commented.

Geralt drew his sword and plunged it into the mortar between two stones, where it sunk six inches before coming to an abrupt halt. He braced himself to force it upwards, to create some sort of crack or hole, when the sword was yanked from his grip, sinking wholesale into the stonework before his eyes. 

“What the _fuck_?”

“Geralt,” Yen said, her hand on his arm. “Did you feel anything? Any magic other than the background hum of this place?”

He shook his head, his hand over his quiet medallion. 

“That shouldn’t be possible, none of this should,” he told her. 

“There were sorcerers a thousand years ago who might be capable of the spells needed to create something like this, but none since.”

The only warning Geralt had was a flicker in the corner of his eye.

Yen yelled for Jaskier to duck just as they both hit the floor, his sword sailing over his head to land, hilt up, in the grass behind him. 

“ _Do not_ try a fireball,” Jaskier hissed from his place face down in the grass, and Geralt could only agree. 

They spent the next four hours attempting to map the ground floor of the palace, the two of them trailing Jaskier who, having by far the best eye, muttered to himself as he drew room after room. 

As they had investigated the two wings separately last time, it was only when they went through together did they realise that there were no stairs up to the next floor. 

Jaskier vetoed mapping the basement until full light the next day, _not all of us can see in the dark, Geralt_ , so they went back out to the rear courtyard to see if they could find the deer that Jaskier had spoken of. They had a little food left, but Geralt would rather eat meat if they could find it. There was no sign of the girl or man he had seen anywhere. There was no sign that anyone lived in the palace at all: even the footprints had gone. 

There was also no game wandering around, so they settled for the last of their crackers and apples for dinner. After, Jaskier sang softly to himself, and Yen and Geralt sat quietly, the smell of night-blooming flowers heavy in the air. 

They slept in shifts again that night, except this time with two awake and one asleep. Geralt had offered to stay up the whole night as he could get by perfectly well with a few hours the next day. He felt awake enough to keep watch by himself when Jaskier nodded off beside him, his feet tucked under Geralt’s thigh, so he let him be. Jaskier didn’t always appreciate how protective Geralt, and Yen, in her own way, were of him, but he was wholly human in a way that Yen and Geralt weren’t, and the first thing Geralt had ever known about himself was that it was his job to protect people. 

They’d arranged themselves on the benches in the entrance hall this time, Yen sleeping on a pile of their winter cloaks on the floor and Geralt and Jaskier on one of the benches. Their food that day had been rather lacking, and Geralt was wondering if the palace kitchens took requests when he heard footfalls: too heavy to be a child’s. 

Taking care not to disturb either Jaskier or Yen, Geralt walked quietly to the door that led into the hall. He listened for a moment then followed the sound into the east wing of the palace, around the corner and into the biggest of the two orangeries. There he found the man who could only be the girl’s father, his features just as sharp in the oil lamp he held as they had been in moonlight the night before.

“Good evening,” he said, before Geralt had decided if he wanted to announce himself or not.

Geralt replied in kind, then let the silence grow up between them.

“Not a figment of my imagination then,” Cirilla’s father said.

“Er, no. I’m Geralt of Rivia.”

“Duny of Erlenwald.”

Geralt scoffed. The prominent nose and granite jaw of the Emreis line was obvious, now he knew to look for it.

“No you’re not, you’re Emhyr var Emreis, rightful Emperor of Nilfgaard.”

Emreis turned to look at him, eyes wide for a moment before he got his expression under control. Geralt couldn’t have said what he’d seen in that brief look. Hunger, perhaps. 

“You spoke to Cirilla,” he stated and Geralt nodded. 

“Yes, until your palace ate her.”

“She is perfectly safe, I assure you.” 

“She’s your daughter,” Geralt said, just to be sure.

Emreis looked at him sharply. 

“She is,” he confirmed after a moment. “And unless you relish the idea of being buried alive, I suggest you take care to do her no harm.” 

Geralt held up his hands. “We never had any plans to, she only asked us to show her where the entrance had been.”

“Yes, I am curious about that myself.”

Emreis said no more but looked at him expectantly, and Geralt realised that that had been his idea of a request. Which was how he ended up taking a midnight stroll through the gardens of the great palace of Nilfgaard, with an Emperor for company. Sometimes his life was strange. 

When he indicated the place where the tunnel had been, Emreis put his hands on the stone just as Geralt had.

“Impossible,” he muttered, under his breath. A human wouldn’t have caught it, but Geralt was far from that.

“Yeah, and yet: here we are.”

Geralt bore Emreis’ narrow-eyed regard for a moment. He and Cirilla looked nothing alike, but she had his mannerisms, that was for sure. 

“You’re a Witcher.”

“Yeah.” 

“And your companions?”

“Yen is a sorceress, Jaskier is handy with a lute and a blade.” 

“Perhaps it was your own powers that allowed you through.”

“You’re saying we did this ourselves? Wait, has no-one else ever got in before?”

“No, you are the first.”

“In how long?”

“What is the date?” Emreis asked. It was a mild question, but he put his hands behind his back as he spoke, perhaps to hide how they twitched or clenched. 

“Early May, 1297. I’m not sure of the exact date - Jaskier would know though.”

“Forty years,” Emreis murmured to himself.

Emreis looked barely forty. Still, they had already established that time did what it liked there. It also meant that there was at least one person they hadn’t met yet: Cirilla’s mother. 

“And who is Emperor?” he added, looking out over the courtyard with studied nonchalance.

“Nicu d’Vellanea. He calls himself _The Righteous Flame_.” 

Emreis was quiet for a moment and Geralt let him be.

When he spoke again it was only to thank Geralt, before walking back across the gardens and into the shadowed palace. 


	3. Chapter 3

On the first day of the second month since their arrival, a set of stairs appeared, leading up to the first floor. 

Well, it was more accurate to say that Geralt _noticed_ a set of stairs. 

They had moved their belongings, meagre as they were, into the great entrance at the front of the palace, setting up the benches for beds and their winter cloaks for bedding. There had to be stables somewhere in the complex, Geralt had reasoned, but if there were they hadn’t found them. It was warm enough for the horses outside for a few months yet, and they were enjoying the grass and never-ending supply of apples. 

Cirilla, or Ciri as they had come to call her, had started appearing with more frequency a week into their captivity—which Jaskier kept referring to as a holiday—and demanding that Geralt teach her to ride. Once she was firm friends with Roach, she wanted Jaskier to teach her the lute and Yen to show her how to call a witchlight. She had taken to these lessons with enthusiasm and a strange, desperate edge: as if she was gulping down their knowledge, determined to learn all she could before some deadline only she knew of. They indulged her, of course. What else was there to do? Geralt occasionally checked where the tunnel had been and he was sure Yen did the same, though she never mentioned it. He was currently testing the theory that the harder he searched for a way out, the colder the water was in the fountain where they washed. He was hoping it was simply correlation, as he very much didn’t want to think through the implications of what it would mean if it was a purposeful change. 

Jaskier had been right: they had come there to hide, and hidden they were. Geralt would not push too hard at the boundaries of the place for the moment, at least. And, more and more, he wondered at the other inhabitants: Ciri’s mother was a question none of them had dared voice to her. 

The stairs, such as they were, were wide and shallow: worn to a soft sheen in the middle. It was past midnight and usually he would wander the gardens when sleeplessness came for him, but something—some noise, some change in the air—had led him out into the many rooms that wound their way to the main orangery in the east wing of the palace. And now, in one of the richly decorated rooms, was a way up to the second floor. 

Geralt climbed them quickly but quietly, watching his footing on the slippery stone. 

They led to a hallway: much wider than the ones downstairs. The first impression was of a significant lack of plant life. Everywhere else was littered with flowers and vines, but here there was only thick dust, with a line of footprints that led from one room to another. Geralt followed them, noting that the windows did not seem to line up with what he remembered from the outside. Not that he was surprised by this discovery: they had all gotten quite blasé about the impossible architecture of the place. 

The most recent set of footsteps lead to a door towards the west wing. Geralt stood outside for a moment but could hear nothing from within. Slowly, he turned the door handle and pushed inwards. 

Books. More books than he’d ever seen in one place. Even the University at Oxenfurt, before the book burnings, had not seemed so overflowing with tomes as this one room. They lined bookcases and piled on tables. They formed leaning stacks and lay spread, open, on the floor. In among the chaos was Emreis, his strong jaw lit harshly by a powerful witchlight.

“You should be in bed,” he commented, without looking up.

“So should you,” Geralt replied and Emreis turned sharply in his chair, the book he was reading tumbling to his feet.

“What are you doing here?” 

Geralt shrugged, taking a careful step into the room. Emreis was giving the distinct impression of something cornered and Geralt didn’t want to startle him further. 

“I couldn’t sleep, went for a walk, found some stairs. Is that you?” he asked, nodding at the witchlight. He hadn’t been aware that Emreis had magic, although it would make sense as Ciri seemed to have an endless supply within her reach.

Emreis drew breath to answer and the light flickered out, plunging them into darkness.

“No,” Emreis replied shortly, and Geralt could see him making his way carefully to the fireplace where he lit a candle, making sure it was well back from the edge before turning to Geralt again. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

“Well, now that you mention it, some bedding would be nice.”

Emreis gave him a narrow look, but Geralt was getting pretty sick of sleeping on hard wood. He was getting pretty sick of Jaskier’s complaints as well. 

The room next door turned out to be an unused bedroom, and Geralt suddenly wondered where Emreis slept. _If_ he slept. 

“Tell me again how you came into the palace grounds,” Emreis demanded as Geralt stripped the bed of its dusty covering then started to pile up the blankets from underneath. 

If the stairs stayed long enough he’d come back for a mattress or two. He, Jaskier and Yen had managed to share much smaller beds than this in the past, although not without threats of actual bodily harm. 

Geralt took a moment to gather his thoughts. He had seen Emreis only a handful of times since they had spoken at the wall, and each time he wanted to hear of how they had found themselves within the palace. 

“I don’t know: there was simply a tunnel, high enough to ride through, but narrow. I thought it was blocked, but at the last moment we saw the end and when we came through we were in the courtyard. That’s all. I’m sorry,” he added. 

He couldn’t imagine being trapped for so long, he was trying not to think of it in terms of how they hadn’t found a way out yet. They hadn’t been there long and, whatever magic inhabited the palace, it wasn’t their curse to bear. He’d help them if he could, but he had no plans to die in this place. A beautiful prison was still a prison. 

“Perhaps the sorceress would have more of an insight,” Emreis snapped.

“Sure, you’d have to stop hiding up here all the time if you want to ask her though.” 

Geralt thought he might walk away. He had a few times before, either because of something Geralt had said or because he was done with the conversation—Geralt wasn’t sure. It had taken him a while to realise that it could simply be the manner of a person who has had little contact with anyone other than a child for a very long time. 

He stayed, however, watching Geralt as he folded the blankets neatly and tucked them under an arm.

“I have read of Witcher trials,” Emreis commented mildly as they entered another disused bedroom, where Geralt again found the least dusty blankets to take downstairs. 

Geralt chose to roll with the subject change.

“There are no complete accounts of the trials outside the Schools, and now there are no Schools,” he told him, pulling off a sheet and turning his head as thick rolls of dust curled into the air.

“What happened to them?”

“The Righteous Flame happened. Now there are pretty much no Witchers, no hedge witches, no sorceresses, no mages. Just a fuckton of necrophages and no-one to kill them.”

Emreis didn’t reply, and when Geralt turned he was gone. 

“Must have been something I said,” he told the empty room. 

Yen’s first question when she woke the next morning was why he hadn’t brought a mattress instead and Jaskier demanded to know if he’d found any clothes. Geralt promised to look for both if he got another chance. All the things one could gather were in reach there: clothes and beds and pots and pans, some mundane and some luxurious beyond the imaginings of their day-to-day existence. But that was not their life, their life was out in the world, doing what little good they could. 

  
  


Geralt placed a neutral card down on the table. 

The stairs to the second floor had appeared again a week after his first discovery and then most nights after that. More often than not, he climbed them to read Emhyr’s books or—more recently—to be thoroughly destroyed at Gwent. Geralt had only taught him to play two weeks ago.

He wasn’t sure when Emreis had become Emhyr in his thoughts, but the first time he’d used his given name out loud Jaskier and Yen had stood up and started yelling at each other about who owed what to whom. Geralt had decided not to ask.

“Tell me something of what has happened in the last forty years.”

“That is a rather general request,” he hedged, sure Emhyr had something in mind.

“Hmm,” Emhyr agreed, as he added another ten points to his total. “Perhaps of the pyres you spoke of some weeks ago.”

Geralt was silent as he considered his next move. Jaskier was the storyteller of their little group, and he needed a moment to decide where to start. Emhyr, master of silences, left him to do so.

“It started slow,” he began. “Just a few more contracts here and there. Just seemed like they were cracking down on the kind of behaviour the powerful usually got away with: a mage who had raped a local girl; a sorceress who had used glamours to steal money from a famed tavern. Most of the contracts were from town officials, and well-paid. I even took one of them before I realised what was happening. He swore he hadn’t done it, but I put the cuffs on him anyway and handed him over.”

Geralt paused to take a long drink of his beer, and was glad when Emhyr offered neither words of comfort or censure.

“Eventually, they came for the Witchers of course. By then I was travelling with Yen and Jaskier. We’ve been getting by ever since.” 

“And the Watchers?”

“I’d like to think they’re all forced to hunt us down, magic users with a family to protect perhaps, but I’ve met enough of them to know that some of them must have volunteered.”

“There will always be some for whom an opportunity for violence, no matter the cost or cause, cannot be missed.”

“You sound as if you’re speaking from experience.” 

Emhyr put down a spy card and his score crept up again. 

“You named me var Emreis when I gave you a false name, so something of my beginnings must be known to you.” 

“Only that it was said that you had died along with your father during an uprising that the current Emperor successfully defeated.”

“And you thought that was a likely tale?”

“To be honest, I didn’t much care who ruled in Nilfgaard.”

“An opinion that surely changed when magic-users began to be targeted.”

He hummed his agreement, surveying his decidedly shit cards: Thaler, one point. Wonderful. 

“Did you not think to seek out the source of the burnings?”

Geralt sighed, looking up from his cards.

“I’m a Witcher, we _have_ to be neutral. We start getting involved in politics, killing kings and emperors,” he shook his head. “That’s just more chaos.”

He put down a decoy card instead, and braced himself for Emhyr’s raised brow. Emhyr, never one to miss an opportunity to dig the knife in, raised both brows then put down Morvan Voorhis’ card. Geralt groaned.

“Do you know anything of him?” Emhyr asked, tapping the card.

Gwent had turned into a potted history of the few decades as Geralt attempted to add something useful to the limited information that appeared on the cards themselves. At first, he’d tried to keep the Nilfgaard deck completely out of sight, but Emhyr had taken one look at the cards as Geralt had explained the game and had known there was a set missing. He had not, however, mentioned the lack of an Emperor card. Geralt had dropped that one in the fire. 

“No, but Yen or Jaskier might know more. They’ve mixed with high society far more than I have.”

They finished the game soon after that, Emhyr winning his second hand. Geralt needed much less sleep than the others, but still apparently more than Emhyr. He had speculated that Emhyr slept in the day, as he certainly didn’t do it at night. Perhaps he guarded Ciri’s sleep.

There was one question he needed to ask still, regardless of its reception. He owed it to Ciri to do so, and he’d been putting it off. As much as he loved Yen and Jaskier, Emhyr’s quiet company had been welcome.

Geralt made his excuses and Emhyr, as usual, walked him to the top of the stairs.

“Your company is appreciated, perhaps more than your historical knowledge,” Emhyr told him, as if reading his thoughts.

Geralt wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or not. 

“Well, I guess 40 years is a long time to be without someone to beat at cards, though you don’t look a day over 60,” Geralt joked, and Emhyr gave him a look so like Ciri’s glare that Geralt laughed.

“What is it?”

“You look nothing like Ciri, until you do.”

“Yes, she has her mother’s beauty.” 

“Where is she? Where is Ciri’s mother?” Geralt asked, his foot on the first step on the stairs.

“Dead,” Emhyr replied, and the stairs crumbled away beneath Geralt’s feet, dumping him on the floor below. 

He sat there for a moment, wondering if he should have asked _what happened to Ciri’s mother?_ instead, and now a hundred unwanted scenarios crowded into his head. He liked Emhyr, he didn’t want him to be a murderer. It was a thought that followed him into sleep, and was waiting for him when he awoke the next morning. 

Ciri obviously cared deeply for her father, speaking of him with fondness. She’d told a story of how she had found his distillery when she was eleven or so that had them all laughing. Geralt had decided he didn’t want to know where the hops came from: the answer would only be as ridiculous as the trees that bore fruit all year round or the stairs that came and went as they wished: impossibility piled up on impossibility. 

There could be a thousand reasons for her death, not least of which the fact that should anyone become ill or hurt there was no help to be had. Geralt kept a close eye on Ciri for the next few days, looking for signs of grief that perhaps he had missed. She was quiet sometimes, but that was a trait that all of them—save Jaskier—had, but what he sensed most from her was a deep longing for something else, something more than the walls that surrounded her. 

He couldn’t fault her for that, one would have to be made of stone to not seek a way out of whatever trap had held her there for all those years.

  
  


“Your father told me your mother was dead. I’m sorry,” he told Ciri a few days later.

She continued brushing Roach down, the action smooth and confident after three months of practice. Roach whinnied a little and Ciri laughed at the noise, which was not the reaction Geralt had been expecting.

“He just says that because he’s angry at her because she doesn’t speak to him.”

“Ciri…” Geralt started, then couldn’t think how to go on. Jaskier would have known what to say.

Ciri turned from Roach to look him in the eye.

“I know you think I’m lying or making up a story, but it’s true. My mother is alive, she is just angry with Father.”

“We’ve been here for months,” he told her gently. “If she’s alive, where is she, Ciri?”

“Oh, that’s easy: she’s here,” Ciri stamped the soil, “and here,” she touched the wall of the stables.

“I don’t understand.”

“She’s the palace, the gardens: all of it. The Emperor tried to kill her, and me and Father, so she turned herself into stone and soil and saved us. She’s protected us ever since.”

Ciri turned back to Roach, and Geralt sat—with more care than he ever had before—on the floor. It explained so much, but it was also utterly impossible. That just wasn’t how magic worked: people could not be turned into objects, not and remain people. Maybe it had been possible once, millennia ago when they had been closer to the chaos that their world was made of, but not now. 

He helped Ciri take off Roach’s saddle and bridle, half his mind on what she had said. When Ciri said her goodbyes and ran off into the palace, Geralt sought out Yen. 

He found her eating an early supper by herself out in the main courtyard. It was getting too cool to sit out in the evenings, but they all did it whenever they could. The feeling of being trapped was a little less acute under the wide sky. 

She offered him some of the stew she was eating—they’d brought a small cooking pot with them, and a deer seemed to wander past every time Yen declared she was hungry—but Geralt refused, as disturbed by the deer now as he had been by the impossible apples when they’d first arrived. 

“That’s absurd,” Yen told him, once he’d relayed by Ciri had told him. “Your handsome invisible friend must have killed Ciri’s mother and she has told herself this fairytale because it’s easier than the truth.”

“Firstly, he’s real—”

“We’ve never met him,” Yen interjected.

“—and secondly, if it were possible. Wouldn’t it make sense? In fact, isn’t it the only thing that explains how this place changes for each of us?” 

“Perhaps," Yen allowed. "It would certainly make sense that a sentient building would like me best.” 

Geralt sighed, extra loudly, just to be clear how very much that wasn’t the point he was making.

Jaskier appeared, as he was wont to once food had been already prepared, and helped himself to some stew.

“Ciri told me her mother is the palace,” Geralt summarized for him.

“Yes, I thought she might be,” Jaskier said, taking a large mouthful of stew. 

“Jaskier, my dear, it’s not possible,” Yen told him, as if she hadn’t decided it was both true and that the palace liked her best not ten seconds ago.

“Of course it’s not, but as it would explain why the water is only warm for you, why food appears when we need it, stairs appear when they feel like it, and pink roses grow at my feet whenever I play any ballads that are about fifty years old, it’s an explanation I’m willing to accept.” 

“Happiness,” Yen said, apropos of nothing.

Jaskier made a sound of agreement into his stew. 

They only had two bowls, so Geralt stole Yen’s and dipped it into the pot. Venison, sometimes wood pigeon, carrots and potatoes from a vegetable garden that never ran out and spices from one of the kitchens that somehow hadn’t spoiled in the last forty years. Perhaps a sentient palace _was_ the only viable explanation. 

He wasn’t sure what difference it made, save it meant he could stop trying to come up with a subtle way to ask Emhyr if he’d killed Ciri’s mother. Although, something that could think perhaps could be reasoned with.

“Then—” he started, but Yen interrupted him.

“I’ve already tried.” 

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say that, if the palace was or is a person, then we should try asking her to let us go.” 

Geralt ate his stew.

“Do you really get warm water to wash in?” Geralt asked Yen, some hours later. 

She was attempting to darn a tear in her least destroyed trousers and mostly swearing in a variety of languages. Geralt usually did all their needlework, as Vesemir had made sure they could all sew a new shirt if they needed to, but for some reason Yen was attempting it herself.

“Want me to try?” he asked, once it was clear Yen had paid no mind to his first question.

“No, I’m going to learn how to sew straight if it’s _the last fucking thing I do_.” She then let out a wordless cry of frustration and dumped the whole pile on the floor.

“Yen.”

“Ciri asked me to help her sew her shirt and I couldn’t even thread the fucking needle for her,” Yen told the pile of clothing at her feet.

Geralt moved to sit next to her, pulling up the trousers into his lap and searching for the tear Yen had been mangling. Mangling for a good cause, but still.

“Well, first of all, you need to double your thread, a single thread isn’t strong enough to hold. You also need to stop pulling so hard: see how the fabric puckers? You’ve just pulled it too tight, that’s all.” 

He offered the bundle back to Yen, who eyed it carefully before taking it. They’d all taken to Ciri, who was clever and funny and clearly very lonely, despite her father’s company. And, apparently, her mother’s, though Geralt was unclear on how that worked. He was equally unclear on where Ciri and Emhyr’s clothing could have been coming from, now that he thought about it. When he expressed this to Yen she laughed.

“You haven’t noticed that their clothes are 40 years out of date? They must have whole wardrobes of the most beautiful court clothes up there, all decades old.” 

“They’d survive this long?”

“If well made and kept from moths, yes.”

“Hmmm.”

He happened to look up and catch Jaskier staring at them with amusement.

“What?”

“I can’t believe you two are talking about _clothes_.” 

“Just because we don’t feel the need to express ourselves through eye-searing colours and an overabundance of velvet does not mean we don’t have sartorial sense,” Yen said, witheringly, apparently unaware that she’d been alternating between the same two travel outfits for the last six months. 

“Speak for yourself,” Geralt added. He wore leather because it wore well, and dark colours because they hid bloodstains. 

“Geralt, you cannot deny you have an interest in clothing and its importance while also wearing a pair of trousers so tight one could tell if you’ve been circumcised or not.”

Yen bent over her sewing, laughing.

“What does circumcised mean?” Ciri asked, appearing from nowhere as usual.

“Ask your father,” Geralt told her, which he was sure he’d regret, but that—like most things right now—seemed like a problem for the future. 


	4. Chapter 4

“Father misses music, I think,” Ciri said as she plucked a simple tune on the lute. She had spent the first ten minutes of her daily lesson proudly showing off the callouses that were developing on the end of her fingers from the strings. 

“What makes you say that?” Geralt asked, trying to imagine Emhyr admitting to such a thing. 

“He sings to himself, when he thinks I can’t hear.”

“He reacted not at all when I played _End of Luck_ for him,” Jaskier commented, naming one of his more famous ballads. “Good,” he told Ciri. “Now again, but count yourself in this time.”

“I don’t think he’s one for big shows of emotion,” Geralt said.

“That’s not true, he tells me he loves me all the time.”

Even Yen looked up at that, and she had maybe spent only two hours in Emhyr’s company altogether. He came downstairs but rarely and, for all that Geralt privately thought the palace reacted to Yen better than anyone else, the way upstairs had never appeared to her. 

Geralt had tried asking both Emhyr and Ciri about the difference in the way the palace treated them all, but Emhyr had changed the subject in such a way that Geralt hadn’t noticed until an hour later, and Ciri had told him her mother was unimpressed because he was always swinging his sword around. He’d denied doing any such thing, but both Jaskier and Yen had looked at him with disapproval so he’d left them to their obviously incorrect assumptions.

Finally, the lute lesson was over and it was Geralt’s turn. He’d offered to teach her to fight at first, but it turned out that Emhyr had that one covered. Geralt had never seen Emhyr with a sword in his hand, but it was clear that Ciri knew what she was doing. Then again, Emhyr could be staging set battles upstairs during the day and they’d never know, seeing as they only ever saw him at night. Jaskier was betting he was a vampire, as if Geralt wouldn’t have noticed that. 

Their horse riding lesson was short that day, as Geralt refused to let Ciri gallop in a place that could change shape and size at will, and she had mastered most of everything else. Instead, they lay on the grass and pointed to clouds, trying to decide what animal or shape they took. So far they’d had a rabbit, a horseshoe, and the deep line Emhyr got on his forehead when he was about to say no to something. 

“Geralt?” Ciri started and Geralt, who even after only four months, knew that that particular tone of enquiry meant that he needed to brace himself, duly did so. “How is Jaskier a man when he has breasts?”

Geralt tried to let out his sigh of relief silently, but Ciri flashed him a knowing look. At least that was an easy one.

“Some men or boys have breasts and other parts you might have thought belong only to women and girls, and for some women or girls it’s the same. Some folk aren’t even women or men or girls or boys.”

“What are they then?” Ciri asked.

“People.”

“How do you know?”

“You ask them, or you let them tell you.”

“I mean, how do _they_ know what they are.”

“In here,” Geralt tapped his chest, over his heart. “And in here,” he said, pointing to his head. “That tells them. Nothing, and no-one else.”

Ciri nodded, accepting that in the easy way that children did and adults generally did not.

“It must be hard, sometimes,” she commented, after a moment.

“What makes you say that?”

“Father says people hate what they don’t understand, and they don’t understand people who are different.” 

Geralt reminded himself that Emhyr had seen the worst of humanity, and instead of going to find him and strangle him, which is what he wanted to do, he tried to formulate an appropriate reply.

“Your father had a tough start in life,” he tried.

“You mean when his father was tortured to death in front of him, then _he_ was tortured, then he fell in love, then Mother couldn’t love him because he lied to her, then the Usurper tried to kill him again and instead he ended up trapped here?”

Geralt gave her a hard look, but her face was as guileless as a summer’s day.

“Yes, exactly.” And then, because he couldn’t help it. “Did Emhyr just _tell_ you all that? About the torture.”

“No, but it wasn’t hard to guess.”

Geralt decided that for the sake of his sanity, he was just going to ignore that.

“So, he hasn’t had much chance to see the good in people—”

“Do you think he has trust issues?”

Geralt put his head in his hands and groaned, but when he looked up Ciri was still there, waiting patiently for an answer to her question.

“Why did your father think it was a good idea to teach you to read?” he asked, half rhetorically.

“Father asks that question too, sometimes. And Mother. He started when I was three, so he’s entirely to blame.”

“Okay, good talk. I’m done,” he announced, getting up.

“Do you think _you_ have trust issues?” Ciri yelled after him.

It wasn’t until he was halfway across the courtyard that it occurred to him to ask how Ciri’s mother—Pavetta, as they’d learnt—expressed anything at all, but of course, when he turned back Ciri was gone. 

Yen hummed with what might have been interest when he mentioned Ciri speaking to the palace to her, but she had remembered where she’d heard Pavetta’s name before and Geralt realised only later that they’d forgotten to go back to the subject.

“She must be Pavetta Fiona Elen. I saw a miniature of her from when she was about 14. Ciri has her beauty.”

“That would make her Queen Calanthe’s daughter. How the fuck did Queen Calanthe’s daughter and the heir to the Nilfguaard throne find each other?” 

“Why don’t you ask Emhyr?”

Geralt snorted. 

“He’s even better at avoiding questions he doesn’t want to answer than you are.” 

“Like, perhaps, why we never see him during the day?”

“Exactly.”

Not that Geralt had asked him: Emhyr was prickly, which Geralt put down to having his heritage stolen—and apparently being tortured—and then being walled in where he couldn’t do anything about it. 

“You haven’t even asked him, have you?”

“Well, not directly.”

“Geralt,” Yen started, taking his hand in hers. “I know he’s stern, and mysterious, and can destroy you at Gwent, but just because he’s your ideal man doesn’t mean you should simply accept him at face value.”

“What?” Geralt asked, taking his hand back and folding his arms. 

“Never mind,” she said, kissing his cheek. “I’ll go see if Pavetta wants to talk.”

“ _What?_ ”

But Yen was already striding away, further into the palace. 

  
  


“Ah, Geralt,” Emhyr said as Geralt walked into the library that evening, helping himself to some beer. “You wouldn’t happen to know why Cirilla asked me about the cultural importance of circumcision, would you?”

“No,” he lied, after choking on his first mouthful. “Maybe you shouldn’t let her loose in your library, eh?”

Emhyr made what Geralt hoped was a sound of belief, returning to his book.

“Cards?” Geralt suggested after leafing through a blatantly false account of the slaughter of the Toussaint Enclave for half an hour. Bigots should not be allowed near pen and ink. 

They played for half an hour, Geralt dropping whatever knowledge he had of the cards into conversation as casually as he could. He’d taken to drilling Yen and Jaskier for information during the day, ignoring the knowing looks they passed each other as best he could.

“Father?” Ciri said, appearing at the open door and wandering into the room. She stopped short when she saw Geralt. “Are you playing cards?”

“Can you not sleep?” Emhyr asked, and held a hand out to her. She went over to him, leaning against his side as she looked curiously at the hand Emhyr had. Geralt willed her to make some comment about what cards he had, but no such luck.

“Can I play?”

“Absolutely not,” Emhyr told her. “You should be in bed.”

“Why not? You’re playing.”

Geralt thought about helping but he so rarely got to see Emhyr and Ciri interact.

“It is not past my bedtime,” Emhyr pointed out, which was not a sentence Geralt had heretofore imagined him saying.

Ciri stamped her foot, suddenly every inch the child she was. It was easy to forget: she knew of subjects that Geralt had never heard of—undoubtedly as a result of reading a whole library by the time she was ten. 

“I will play in the day when you can’t stop me!” Ciri said, folding her arms over her overly large dressing gown.

“Cirilla!”

She ran out of the room, and the door slammed itself behind her. The silence she left behind was uncomfortable, and Geralt had no idea how to break it. It was Emhyr’s turn, so he couldn’t even put a card down.

“I do my best for her,” Emhyr told him, as if Geralt’s opinion on his skills as a father meant something to him. 

“She must just be tired,” Geralt told him.

“She is tired of these walls, of only reading of an outside world she may never get to see.”

“And you?” 

Emhyr studied his cards, but made no move to continue his play.

“When Pavetta informed me of her pregnancy,” he began without looking up, “I had been living under an assumed name. I felt I owed her the truth of who I was: of who my father had been. She was… upset. She swore she would not marry me and that our child would never sit on a Nilfgaardian throne. She still came to see me, but only out of respect for what we had once had. Not long after, we were caught by hunters who sold us to the Usurper's faithful. We were brought to the palace and he ordered us killed. I remember nothing after that, but Cirilla does.”

_“Ciri_ remembers? How old could she have been?”

“She was not yet born, and had been no more than a month curled under her mother’s heart, but yes—if you ask her she will tell you that she remembers a bright light, flowers growing between her hands, and hard stone under her knees.”

“Perhaps it’s Pavetta’s memory,” Geralt suggested.

“Perhaps,” Emhyr allowed, but Geralt daren’t push any further: it was the most Emhyr had shared of himself in the four months they had been trapped together.

Emhyr finally put down a card, to Geralt’s great relief, and he went back to being soundly beaten by someone who’d learnt to play only two months ago, and had never heard of half the people on his cards. 

“Cirilla informs me that you’ve been washing in the fountain,” Emhyr said once he’d won his second game.

“Yes, where else would I wash?” Geralt asked, watching Emhyr shuffle his cards with enviable skill.

“Follow me,” Emhyr said, instead of answering the question.

Geralt shrugged and got to his feet: he had nowhere else to be, and he hoped that whatever Emhyr wanted to show him would involve water warmer than Skellige in winter.

They left the library and went down the stairs to the ground floor, first passing through the orangery and then one of the inner courtyards. There was an ornate hallway that led to the cloister that Geralt had explored when he’d first arrived, but they veered left into a room with a large spiral staircase that wound down into the darkness of the floor below. 

Geralt raised his eyebrows, but said nothing as he followed Emhyr down. Yen had investigated the basement herself once they’d discovered that the palace was much happier with her than it was with Geralt. She’d found nothing other than sadly empty wine cellars and a whole lot of mushrooms, thriving in the dark. 

Emhyr walked with purpose, a lamp in hand. They went through one door and down a further few steps that lead to a corridor that smelt of heat and damp. Geralt had guessed there was a hot spring or some sort by the smell before they’d even entered the room, but he had not been expecting such grandeur. There were three deep pools, hewn from the rocks and inlaid with intricate mosaics; carved benches lined the walls, dark where water had seeped into the wood. 

Perhaps if Geralt had considered the idea for a minute he might have concluded that the Emperor of Nilfgaard must have had a way to bathe, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the palace was hiding such a luxury. 

Emhyr turned to look at him, lamp held high. Invitation or not, Geralt wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to wash in hot water. Jaskier would be ecstatic when he told him. He put a dirty boot onto the nearest bench and started to unknot the lacings. 

“Can you see if I take the lamp?” Emhyr asked.

“Yes.”

Geralt was already barefoot and shirtless, eager to be in the water.

“I will fetch some drying cloths.” 

The darkness would be almost absolute without the lamp, but Geralt had the layout memorised already and would manage fine even without a potion or sign. As it was, Emhyr only went around the corner, the light twisting his shadow into something long and inhuman behind him.

Geralt stripped of the rest of his clothes and lowered himself gratefully into the nearest pool. The water was a little shy of scalding, and it smelt of deep, clean earth. He kept his eyes closed as he heard the clink of a buckle and then Emhyr’s steps across the floor. He had no idea how Emhyr felt about his privacy, but erring on the side of caution was best in the circumstances. He did not want to offend the only decent Gwent player in the vicinity. The only decent player who didn’t cheat, anyhow.

When he opened his eyes he found that Emhyr was at the opposite side of the pool to Geralt. Wisps of steam would have obscured his view had he been wholly human, but they made little difference to Geralt. Emhyr had more bulk than his loose clothing would suggest, and his arms where they stretched along the lip of the pool were corded with muscle. Geralt could see the edge of a deep scar that wrapped around his shoulder and disappeared over the curve of his back which looked, to his practiced eye, like the edge of a whiplash. 

Another mystery to add to the other questions that rose up with the silence that sometimes pooled between them as they read or conversed or played cards, deep into the night: _Are those scars from the torture that Ciri so casually mentioned?_ _Why do you hide in the day? What else are you hiding?_

Eventually, Geralt closed his eyes and drowsed. It must have been close to four in the morning when the sound of water indicated that Emhyr was getting out.

He opened his eyes to find Emhyr turning to pull himself out of the pool, and Geralt forgot to make even a pretence at not staring. His back was a patchwork of whip scars and burns, laid one over another in an agony of warped flesh. They were old and stretched, and Geralt realised with a chill that he must have been young when he received them.

Emhyr turned back and stood, dripping and naked. The look in his eyes was hard, testing almost. Geralt swallowed back his questions, and Emhyr walked away to a bench where he picked up a cloth and began to dry himself off. Geralt felt as if he’d just passed some trial, though he couldn’t have said for what. 

  
  


Whatever Pavetta had done, Geralt doubted she even knew herself. Emhyr’s reluctance to speak of her meant that they knew only very little of what had taken place, but what they did know was that she had been utterly untrained, possibly even unaware of her abilities. Yen would have heard of such a powerful practitioner if she had been, so her spell was likely the result of a massive amount of magic and fear. Emhyr’s next memory after coming to the palace was finding himself in a dark room, alone. 

Ciri explained that she had turned up in a bookcase about 13 years ago as a newborn and Emhyr had confirmed it. Also, an unheard piece of magic, but they’d all stopped being surprised about three months ago. 

Geralt tried to imagine Emhyr changing soiled clothing and milking goats and failed. He had managed, obviously, as Ciri was living proof. She refused to even discuss the idea of leaving the palace, convinced that it would require some great sacrifice to do so, and they had long since stopped discussing their ideas when she was in earshot. 

Those discussions had brought only one theory: in the same way one saw parents perform impossible feats of strength to save their children, Pavetta had done the impossible to save her family. Geralt had once seen a mere hedgewitch pull life from the earth and trees to save her daughter. Multiply that by an incredibly powerful, untrained sorceress and you might just get an impregnable palace and a daughter kept unborn for some thirty years. 

The _how_ to break it was still a work in progress. Yen was convinced that having a sorceress within the spell was key, but what she was supposed to do was anyone’s guess. All magic had rules, one just had to work out what they were. Which was a little difficult when the castor was a pile of stones, but they had dealt with weirder things.

They were carefully not discussing what would happen if they did manage to break the spell. The Emperor, or the Usurper as Emhyr called him, if he referred to him at all, had many enemies but had been in power for over fifty years. People got used to things, even evil things, and the Usurper and his Watchers were well and truly entrenched. Children even sang skipping songs about them: _one, two; Watchers coming for you; three, four; at the door; five, six; get pyre sticks; seven, eight; it’s too late_. 

“Geralt! Catch me!” Ciri yelled, and Geralt looked up from his musings to see her standing on the roof of the entrance. Thick vines were snaking around the edges of the stone should she fall, but she leapt over them and into Geralt’s waiting arms.

She giggled, sweetly trusting, as Geralt put her down and tried to explain why jumping from eight feet to the ground was not a great idea. She nodded very seriously, patted his arm, and ran off. 

Sometimes she would sprout century-old battle theory and sometimes she would make flower-crowns and insist they all wear them while they ate lunch. Geralt was sure she was the main reason none of them had gone mad yet. 

If Emhyr truly was gone in some way during the day… well, it was unsurprising that Ciri was so insistent on spending time with them. She had graduated from witchlights to the basics of shield magic. Yen had confided that she was not sure she had ever met a more powerful girl, which made sense in light of her mother. He and Yen had speculated on her lineage, but neither of them were particularly knowledgeable of such things and Jaskier hadn’t known either. Geralt had subtly looked for a book on the subject in Emhyr’s library, but if there had been one on the family tree of the House of Raven, it was gone now. 

Geralt was half convinced that Emhyr became part of the palace himself during the day, but the questions he had for him caught in his throat whenever they spent any time together. He didn’t want to risk the tenuous rapport they had when he was sure now that whatever he was hiding would do no harm to any of them. He trusted Emhyr, he was surprised to discover, and couldn’t help the small slip of hurt that Emhyr did not trust him in return. Not with his secrets, at least. 

He wondered if Emhyr was in fact the key to undoing whatever Pavetta had done. Unknowingly, of course. Emhyr was fixated on the Emperor and his plans to dethrone him. Even in the few hours he had spent in Jaskier and Yen’s company, he had steered the conversation towards subjects that would benefit him were he to attempt to take back his title: Jaskier’s powerful patrons, or the nobility who had shown Yen favour, back when such a thing was possible. 

Now not even the richest of high society would seek Yen’s skills. It had been made clear early in the Emperor’s rule that wealth would not protect anyone from the pyres, should they try to shield those the Watchers hunted. Geralt tried not to think about the horrors happening outside of the walls of the palace. For all that they were trapped, they were as safe as they could be. But it also meant that they couldn’t offer even the meagre help they had before. Jaskier had been quick to point out that half the time people would let Geralt kill whatever needed killing, then send a message to the nearest Watchers Tower that they had found a Witcher rather than pay the fee. 

Geralt was sure it hadn’t been _half_ the time. A quarter, perhaps. 

Still, it galled him to be safe when so many weren’t, when there were so few active Witchers left. He hoped their wanted posters had faded, trodden into the winter mud, but he knew well enough that they would have just been replaced with crude drawings of others who would take their place in the fires. He could see now that there would be no end to them: that once all the Witchers, mages, and sorcerers were dead the Emperor would find some new threat to burn. That was the problem with weapons: no-one ever looked at a sword at the end of a war and thought, _we won’t need such a thing again, best to melt it down for a cartwheel_. 

The pyres had been built, and now they must be fed.

And perhaps Emhyr was the one to end the cycle, and the best thing they could do was to break the spell and help him regain his throne. If it had just been Emhyr, Geralt might have slept easy on the idea, but for Ciri it felt as if he would be helping her free of one cage just to for her to step into another. 


	5. Chapter 5

Yen had called for a family meeting: the last one they’d had was when they’d realised how many Watchers were on their tail and had decided to ride—swiftly—down to Nilfgaard. 

Geralt stepped up to where Yen and Jaskier were already huddled in the farthest corner of the courtyard and felt the disorientating lurch of a privacy spell. He opened his mouth to ask if such a strong spell was necessary, then remembered where they were and shut it again. If their goal during the last family meeting had been to find a way to be safe from Watchers, then they had certainly achieved it. 

“We can’t leave them,” Yen told him, as if he were about to argue that they should abandon Ciri at the first opportunity.

“We _can’t_ leave Ciri,” Jaskier pointed out. “Pavetta wouldn’t let us.” 

“Not just Ciri, Pavetta and Emhyr too,” Yen insisted. 

“Pavetta is likely keeping us all here,” Jaskier said. “If you asked her to come with us, perhaps she would let us leave.”

“She doesn’t know how.”

“Okay, so we need to help her with that,” Jaskier suggested, as if it were that simple. 

“What do you think Emhyr has been reading about for the last forty years? Crop rotation?” Geralt asked, when he was finally able to get a word in edgeways.

“Emhyr is a very scary bookworm, and Yen is a very scary sorceress. I think Yen might be the expert here, Geralt.”

Geralt flicked Jaskier’s ear in retaliation, and the family meeting had to be momentarily paused while Jaskier tried to bite Geralt from his place within a headlock. 

“Gentlemen,” Yen said.

Geralt let Jaskier go, but not before kicking him in the ankle.

“I think we need to know what it is that Emhyr is hiding from us,” Yen added, but Geralt was distracted by Jaskier who was making a great show of limping. “Geralt!” she yelled, impatiently.

He turned back to her just as a vine shot up and wrapped around his knees. He struggled for a moment before letting himself go down to his side, reaching for a dagger as he did so.

“No! Stop!” Yen demanded, and both Geralt and the winding vines froze in place. “I wasn’t angry, it’s fine,” Yen placated, her hands held out to the vines, but not touching them. 

Slowly, the vines began to retreat, winding their way back into the grass and disappearing into the earth.

“I think I speak for everyone present when I say, what the fuck was that?” Jaskier said. 

Geralt slowly got to his feet, alert for any movement.

“Yen?” he asked.

Yen closed her eyes for a moment.

“Two days ago I was in the cellar and I tripped. It was nothing, I wouldn’t have fallen far, except I didn’t get a chance because Pavetta caught me.” 

“You mean—?” Jaskier started.

“No, not her. Like this—” she gestured to the flowers winding up the wall next to them “—knotweed and kudzu appeared and caught me.”

“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?” Geralt asked.

“I called a family meeting.” 

“In which you didn’t tell us about the avenging plant,” Jaskier pointed out.

“I was getting to it,” Yen insisted. 

“I hope this doesn’t mean we have to be nice to you all the time!” Jaskier seemed genuinely concerned by the idea.

“It also means that your privacy spell isn’t worth shit, so you may as well drop it.”

Yen casually waved a hand and Geralt felt the spell dissipate. 

“What were you even doing in the cellar?” he asked.

“I traded with Emhyr: I told him every rumour I’d ever heard about the Nilfgaardian court in exchange for everything he could remember about the spell. He described waking up in a small room in the centre of the palace and having to walk down a long corridor with an earthen floor to reach the ground floor. I was looking for that room.”

“And did you find it?” 

“No,” she admitted. 

“But you were rescued from a minor bruise by an incredibly powerful sorceress who is currently doing a very good impression of a pile of stones,” Jaskier said. “No offence,” he added to the nearest flower.

“Yes.” 

“Who now considers herself your avenging angel and will attack anyone she perceives to what? Not answer you quickly enough? Use too much sarcasm?”

“You’d have been buried alive already if that was the case,” Geralt told him.

Jaskier flicked him an annoyed glance, but kept his attention on Yen who had folded her hands into her sleeves in a pose that Geralt always thought of as her ‘I must not turn people who annoy me into ashes’ stance, which was subtly different from her ‘I love Jaskier and I would be sad if I exploded him in a spray of blood and bone’ pose. 

“I wouldn’t knowingly put you in danger, either of you,” Yen told them, as if they would ever think otherwise.

Geralt opened his mouth to make a joke about a certain fire spell that had left everyone minus their eyelashes, but Jaskier took her hand in his own.

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

She smiled at him, gratefully and Geralt reconsidered his comment. Perhaps he’d mistaken her ‘I’m genuinely sorry and I’ve forgotten that you’re my friends and will forgive me for fucking up’ expression. They both turned to him, still holding hands.

“Er, yeah. No harm done,” he told her. 

“Perhaps you could explain that we only mock you out of love?” Jaskier suggested.

“I’ll talk to her,” Yen promised, which seemed good enough for Jaskier so Geralt let it go. 

  
  
  


“Father likes you,” Ciri told him, with the tactlessness of youth.

Geralt carried on sharpening his blade for a few minutes to see if she wanted to add anything more to that, but she just continued on her own blade.

“You told me I’d not earned his favour not so long ago,” Geralt replied.

Ciri held her dagger up to the light for a moment, then brought it down again into her lap.

“Can Yennefer really help us without hurting mother?” she asked, apparently done with Emhyr’s affections as a topic already. 

“I don’t know,” Geralt told her, looking at her even though she was still concentrating on her task. If she should look up, he wanted her to know he was sincere. “But anything we do try, we’ll talk through with you and Emhyr first. And your mother, of course.”

His sword was as sharp as it was going to get by now, but he felt like Ciri was building up to something. More than once he’d sat with a child who’d told him all about their imaginary friend or favourite toy before telling him what he needed to know about the thing that had destroyed his or her family. 

“You don’t sleep much, and neither does Father. I think it’s good, because you keep him company and....”

“And what?”

She shrugged, and Geralt waited her out.

“He hurt himself once,” she said, in such a rush that he had to give himself a moment for the words to line up correctly in his mind.

“Did he ever hurt you?” he asked, in as neutral a voice as he could manage.

“No! Never. He dropped a glass when he was—” She hesitated and although Geralt wondered at what she had planned to say, he didn’t interrupt. “Anyway, he dropped the glass and I heard so I came and… He said it was an accident, but he let me help him and he _never_ lets me help.”

The problem was that Geralt did not have the rapport with Emhyr that everyone seemed to think he had. They played Gwent and argued about the magical theory that Emhyr had learned from books that were mostly over a century old. 

Ciri seemed to take his silence as reluctance.

“I know he is stubborn,” she continued. “But please don’t let him do anything stupid. You coming here has given him hope that we can leave, that _I_ can leave. I think he’d do anything for us to be free of this place.” 

“I won’t,” he promised, and Ciri gave him a watery smile that was like a knife to his heart. 

How Yen could think that he had even considered leaving her behind he’d never know: Ciri was as tenacious as the vines that held up the crumbling stones of the palace. When she laughed all the flowers raised their heads and tilted towards her, like she was their sun. There was no spell that she couldn’t master, and no sword-skill that she couldn’t learn, practicing again and again until Geralt made her stop and rest. Determined, that’s what she was, a trait she had certainly gotten from Emhyr. 

Pavetta too, perhaps; although, she had unbent enough to mostly stop closing doors in Geralt’s face. 

Geralt was still unclear about how anyone communicated with what was essentially a sentient pile of stones but he had learned to keep those kinds of thoughts to himself if he didn’t want the baths in the cellar to disappear again. Washing in cold water in November was an experience he’d had many a time before, but not one he wished to repeat if he could help it. 

He and Jaskier usually went down to the baths together: he dared not think about what luxuries Pavetta was providing for Yen when she went, but steaming hot water and floral soap were good enough for him. 

They went that evening, and as Jaskier undressed he enthused the entire time about the baths and the murals, as he had done every week for the two months since Emhyr had shown Geralt how to find them. Once Jaskier was naked he walked unabashed towards the baths, and Geralt was struck anew with love for his friend. 

“Hey Jaskier,” he said. Jaskier turned, pausing in his explanation of colour themes, or something similar. “You've got a bald patch right here you know,” Geralt told him, gesturing to the back of his own head.

Jaskier's hands flew up to check, where he found nothing but thick hair.

“I hate you,” he told Geralt, and Geralt grinned at him, fondly. 

“Do you think we’ll get out of here?” he asked, once they’d settled into the larger of the pools.

“Of course, can you imagine trying to keep Yen here for longer than she wants to be?”

“It’s been managed so far,” Geralt pointed out.

“I think she’s enjoying the company.”

“And why does everyone think I’d leave Ciri and Emhyr behind?”

“We don’t, but you do get a little fire and hacking when there is a problem you can’t solve straight away.”

“Hacking?” Geralt protested.

“You destroyed one of the rooms when we first got here and for the next few months we were denied the amenities of this beautiful palace.”

The bath bubbled, happily.

“I was defending myself.”

“Uh-huh. I bet you were kicking doors down the second we left you alone.”

“I—” Geralt started, then remembered that he had been a little forceful in gaining entrance to a few rooms. “How was I supposed to know the place would _bear a grudge_?”

A torrent of freezing cold water spurted out of the wall, plastering Geralt’s hair to the side of his face.

“Shut up, Jaskier,” he added.

He was clean at least, if not particularly warm as he headed up the stairs that evening to see Emhyr. He left Yen and Jaskier reminiscing about some tavern in Attre they’d stayed for two weeks together. Jaskier had been popular with pretty much every unmarried woman in the village by the time they’d left, as he often was on the occasions when they hadn’t been hurried out by ungrateful villagers with the threat of Watchers.

“I hear you have sworn a solemn oath to protect me from myself,” Emhyr commented that night as they read in front of the fire. 

Geralt was hopeful that that was the only part of their conversation that Ciri had relayed. 

“Well, someone has to save you from sleepless nights and permanent eye strain,” he joked. 

“By reading with me well into the night?” Emhyr asked, making an elegant gesture that took in both their books and the witchlight that hovered nearby. 

Geralt had been making his way through a history of the local area, hoping to find something that might help with the spell they were stuck in, and Emhyr was reading something in a language Geralt didn’t recognise. 

“For company, then.”

“Well, that I am short of. Other than my beloved daughter of course. Speaking of whom, are you aware that she has decided that she wishes to be a troubadour?”

Geralt, who had made the mistake of taking a sip of beer, choked.

“No?” he managed once he’d stopped coughing.

“I don’t suppose there is anything to gain from dissuading Master Jaskier on his attempts to teach her to sing?”

“Probably not. He was a teacher at the University of Oxenfurt before all this-” Geralt attempted to encapsulate 40 years of book burnings and horror with a gesture- “and I think he misses teaching. Anyway, she’s good. Good at everything, actually: she can fight, she can sing, she can ride, and she can do things with magic that make Yen raise an eyebrow. She could be anything she wanted to be.”

“What she will be is Empress of Nilfgaard,” Emhyr stated, with a peculiar kind of fervour.

Geralt shrugged, not wanting to naysay a belief that must have gotten Emhyr through some hardships, stuck here decade after decade, reading the same books over and over again. 

“And you would do anything to get her there?” 

Emhyr huffed something that was almost a laugh when he caught him looking.

“Do not worry yourself. Cirilla and Pavetta would not be safe in a world where the Usurper still called himself Emperor. I will not be sacrificing myself to whatever great spell Lady Yennefer weaves and regardless, there is no need: my own troubles have nothing to do with the spell Pavetta wrought.”

Geralt knew he should be interested in Emhyr’s reference to whatever it was that kept him hidden during the day, but he couldn’t bring himself to care at that moment. Emhyr’s right sleeve had fallen back as he spoke, revealing spidery scars that flowed from Emhyr’s palm to his wrist. _He let me help him_ , Ciri had said.

Those small scars were like a single touch that broke the windowpane. A thousand other knocks and scrapes had worn away at it while they sat in this room together, night after night. He’d never spent so much time with anyone who wasn’t Yen or Jaskier.

He put his book aside and knelt in front of Emhyr, whose eyes widened. He took one of his hands and carefully, so that Emhyr could stop him if he wished, brought those scars to his lips.

“Do not,” Emhyr said, and Geralt froze. “If you do not mean it: do not.” 

“I mean it,” Geralt said, and rose up on his knees to press his lips to Emhyr’s. 

  
  
  


Emhyr was gone by morning, and Geralt lay in silk sheets warmed by the sun and tried to decide if he’d made a terrible mistake or not. He was not one to seek intimacy from any source, and he’d felt that Emhyr might be the same. Now, in the light of day, he could see that Emhyr perhaps had only latched onto the first person he’d had some kind of interaction with in the last forty years. It wasn’t like Geralt didn’t know this happened: on occasion he’d found people who’d been trapped for days, sometimes weeks, by some monster or another, and had felt a connection with Geralt that simply hadn’t been there. Geralt would never have accepted advances from any of them, so why had he done so from Emhyr? Worse, he had sought it out, without first considering the consequences. 

Then there was Ciri to consider, and Pavetta. 

He rubbed his face in an attempt to quell his thoughts and rolled out of bed, scanning the room for his clothes. It wasn’t even Emhyr’s bedroom: it didn’t smell of him and none of his clothes were there. It was just one of many rooms that lead off the same hallway as the library: dusty and impersonal. 

His shirt and doublet were in the room, but everything else was scattered across the library next door, except for his boots which had been placed by his usual chair. He stared at their incongruous neatness, trying to imagine Emhyr setting his boots together but leaving his clothing where it lay. 

Geralt often stayed late into the night with Emhyr and sometimes then mediated outside until daybreak, so neither Yen nor Jaskier remarked on his absence when he joined them for breakfast. 

Six months was enough to have a routine, one that now revolved around Ciri teaching Yen High Nilfgaardian—with an emphasis on insults—and Jaskier teaching Ciri to sing. Geralt was glad he’d thought to ban Jaskier from teaching her drinking songs early on, but it was only a matter of time before he decided that she was ready to learn _The Widow’s Itch_ and similar delights. At which point Pavetta would probably kill them and they wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the spell or any ill-thought-out trysts. 

He and Ciri still rode most days, unless the weather was bad, then even if they’d wanted to, Pavetta blocked off the stables so they couldn’t get to the horses. Geralt had, more than once, found himself trying to talk a wall into letting him get to his own horse. He very much wanted to say he’d had stranger experiences, but he wasn’t sure that was true at this point.

“You look tired,” Ciri told him, later that morning.

Geralt hummed his agreement, willing her to find another source of interest while he continued with his inventory of their clothing. Jaskier was going to need new boots soon and so far they’d found nothing that fitted him well enough. He spent most of the day pulling apart a soft leather pair that were too small for all of them, trying to see how they were stitched together and if he could replicate them well enough to stop Jaskier’s feet freezing off. By the time the sun was starting to set, he was surrounded by tiny pieces of leather and had little clue how most of them fit back together. 

The only thing he had succeeded in was avoiding his friends.

He gave up. Folding himself into a more comfortable position, he cleared his mind and meditated, setting himself an hour's limit so he could at least show his face at dinner with some kind of equilibrium. He hoped it wasn’t his turn to cook.

When he opened his eyes again, he felt not in the slightest bit more relaxed, and disconcertingly, the scrapped remains of the boots he’d taken apart were gone. No-one had come in, he was sure of that, which only left Pavetta, disappearing them while he meditated.

“Er, thanks,” he told the empty room, then went to find the others.

As it turned out, it was his turn to cook. He was greeted by three expectant looks when he walked into the serving room, next to one of the bigger kitchens that they’d been using as a dining room. It had a fireplace big enough to roast a horse, which had been lit some time ago by the size of the flames.

“Well shit,” Jaskier said, correctly guessing that Geralt wasn’t hiding dinner behind his back. 

“Maybe there are apples on the tree?” he suggested.

“I’ll go check the larder,” Ciri volunteered, running out of the room.

“Larder?”

Geralt hadn’t even known they had a larder: they’d been keeping any left-over meat in a salt box outside for the last month or so. 

Ciri came back a few minutes later with a basket on her arm, from which she produced eggs, potatoes, salted pork and a round of soft-looking cheese. There were goats in the stables which gave them their milk and butter, but he had no idea they’d had any cheese. 

In the end it was a group effort: Jaskier chopped the potatoes fine enough to fry which they had with everything else, the eggs and cheese a hot creamy mess on top. 

It was good enough that he was forgiven for forgetting, despite the fact it was Ciri who’d saved them from a dinner of apples and fried grubs. Yen hadn’t spoken to him for a week the first time they’d run out of coin and he’d served up fried locusts.

Sated and full, Geralt nursed his beer while Jaskier sang about a lover lost to a stormy sea, Ciri dozing at his side. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t go up on the stroke of midnight, but he found himself standing in the hallway, waiting for the clock that never needed winding to strike. He took the stairs quickly, and found the door to the library already open.

“Evening,” he said, hesitating by the door before going to his usual seat, opposite Emhyr’s.

“Good evening,” Emhyr replied.

Geralt picked up a random book from the pile next to him and opened it to the first page. He knew he had to say something, but he was very much hoping Emhyr would be the one to break the silence.

The fire crackled merrily in the grate and outside wind rustled through the overgrown hedges.

“Your book is upside down,” Emhyr commented, turning a page of his own.

Geralt, with as much dignity as he could muster, turned it the right way around and made himself read the first paragraph. 

It was a romance novel.  
  


He’d read a chapter before Emhyr spoke again and had learnt more than he’d ever wanted to know about the cost of lace.

“If you are having second thoughts I prefer you to be honest about them,” Emhyr said, without looking up. 

He turned another page, far too soon after the last to have actually read it. That, more than his words, gave Geralt the courage to be honest.

“I’m not,” he replied, letting Emhyr see the truth of his statement.

Emhyr didn’t move or speak, but some fractional easing of his posture showed his relief.

Once Geralt had found a slightly more appropriate book to read they continued with their usual routine. Perhaps Emhyr read aloud a little more than he usually did, or asked for Geralt’s opinion more often, but it was a peaceful kind of intimacy to sit together in the quiet and be content. 

Only when Geralt glanced up at the clock to see that it was past three in the morning, his usual time to leave, did Emhyr speak of something other than the book he was reading.

“You won’t stay?” he asked.

Geralt stood and went over to him, all his morning worries forgotten as they kissed, and Emhyr’s book fell to the floor, unheeded. It had been quick and almost desperate between them last night, but this time Emhyr followed Geralt’s lead when he slowed them down until they were exchanging chaste kisses between sharing each other’s air. 

“I will be gone by the morning, however it is no comment on you or what has passed between us.”

Geralt successfully fought down the urge to make a very crude joke.

“At times I sincerely worry about your sense of humour,” Emhyr added, which showed he had at least been paying attention since they met.

“I know,” Geralt replied, and leant back in for a kiss.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh, so I'm a little early...

Winter was cold, colder than Geralt thought it would get this far south. More often than not they all huddled in the east orangery, which caught the sun in the morning and was a tolerable temperature by the time they’d broken their fast. It wasn’t cold enough to bother Geralt, but he could admit that the older he got, the more he appreciated furs and fires in winter.

“Why did we never do anything about the Emperor?” he asked Yen who was rather skilfully darning a sock.

Her hands stilled in their work and she looked up at him, surprised.

“What a strange question for a Witcher to ask.”

He shrugged, running a whetstone back and forth over Jaskier’s daggers: he wanted them to be sharp enough so when Jaskier used them it would take a moment before a body realized it had been cut. 

“Not so strange.”

“Why not?” she demanded, all her attention on Geralt. 

He knew he should have had this conversation with Jaskier. Jaskier would have been writing the lyrics for a song of their heroic deeds before Geralt had even finished his sentence. Unfortunately, he was giving Ciri a singing lesson in the chapel, where the harmonics were better.

“So many dead Yen, no much needless death and we did nothing but run here to save our own skins.”

“Nothing? Was it not the White Wolf who took down the Watcher’s Tower at Vallweir? And did not Yennefer of Vengerberg call a storm so powerful that for five days no fires could be lit and by the time it had blown itself out, all the condemned had mysteriously disappeared?”

Geralt opened his mouth to reply, but Yen was apparently not done.

“And Jaskier! Who is not one of nature’s instinctive champions—he has slit the throats of more than one Watcher to save our skins, and has sung pretty ballads while his hands shook with fear so we could escape unnoticed. How easily you dismiss us.”

“I don’t mean to, Yen, I just think maybe there was something more we could have done, that _I_ should have done.”

“Geralt, bravery does not have to be something you spend all at once, and I will not apologise for wanting to live, even if it meant others die.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t want you to sacrifice yourself in that way, you nor Jaskier.”

“The compromises we made, the people we didn’t save: they are things we must live with, but I don’t think we missed some singular opportunity to change the world.”

“Emhyr—” Geralt started and Yen scoffed.

“Is an Emperor, or close enough. He thinks that because a ruler gives an order he has made it so, but it is his people who make the difference. He would do well to remember that when he sits on his throne.” 

Geralt turned Jaskier’s blades over in his hands, testing their grip. They were finely crafted, and leather on the handle that was warm and soft to touch. 

He didn’t want to think about Emhyr on the throne. Perhaps he only felt guilty because, for all that he couldn’t stand to be trapped there forever, in some ways it had been a relief to stop, to be forced to put down his swords. He wanted to teach Ciri all he knew; to hear the songs that Jaskier had time to write; to watch Yen slowly and skilfully unravel the mystery of the spell they’d been caught in. He missed the Path as it had been, when there had been time to rest with his brothers in Kaer Morhen and laughter had lit its dour walls. But there was no going back to that time, only forward: or not, as the case may be, trapped as they were in a place where time only existed when it wished to.

It was a difficult thing to pinpoint while within it: they had never experienced the kind of warping of time as they had when they’d first arrived, and the days seemed to move with the sun across the sky. 

It was early when he’d made his way to the next floor—barely one in the morning, but Emhyr had been waiting for him at the top of the stairs that evening and had led him to the room they usually used instead of the library. He had asked innocuous questions about Geralt’s day as he had done so, perhaps in an attempt to distract Geralt from their destination, and then had kissed him once they were in the room so he hadn’t had a chance to mock Emhyr for his lack of restraint as of yet. 

He was still catching his breath while Emhyr had decided that post sex was an excellent time to describe his ongoing attempts with Yen to build a spell within the one they were already in that would… well, the theory was that, with enough power, it would create an equal and opposite force that would nullify whatever Pavetta had done. It sounded like wishful thinking to Geralt, but he wasn’t about to say that. It also meant that Emhyr had spent the last two nights arguing about magical theory with Yen in the library, which would go some way to explain why he’d cornered Geralt the second he walked up the stairs alone that evening. 

Yen was more inclined towards women than men, but he couldn’t help but notice how well they’d looked together: their black hair lit by a witchlight; Emhyr’s paleness next to Yen’s darker skin. He was annoyed with himself the second the thought occurred to him, but it was difficult to forget that Emhyr had met only three people in the last forty years, and the chances of him falling for one of them was almost non-existent, let alone the least refined of the bunch.

“You are not listening to me,” Emhyr commented, his head resting on his hand where he was propped up beside Geralt on the bed.

“I am, you were talking about how helpful Yen has been.”

“Actually, I was wondering aloud how she ever spent so much time among kings and queens with her tendency to say exactly what she thinks. It has been a long time indeed since anyone has been quite so forthright with their opinions on my knowledge, or apparent lack thereof in the case of magical theory.”

“Hmmm,” Geralt agreed, not sure why they were still talking about Yen while in bed and naked. Surely it was impolite, or some such?

“I’m interested as to why you thought the opposite? Surely you’re not jealous of the time I spend having my intellect insulted?”

“No,” Geralt lied.

Emhyr laughed softly and kissed him.

“If I were to choose another of your companions, I assure you, it would be Jaskier.”

“What? Why?” Geralt demanded, knowing full well he was being baited.

“I prefer men, for the first point, and for the second, he has the superior singing voice.” Emhyr paused. “On reflection, I think Roach may have a superior singing voice to you.” 

Geralt stared at him for a moment before grabbing a pillow and shoving it in his face. 

“Fuck you I can sing.”

“You can growl,” Emhyr told him. 

Emhyr had caught the pillow handily and put it behind him. Geralt was tempted to try again with another, but he settled for folding his arms and glaring. It didn’t have quite the effect he was going for as Emhyr smiled at him, leaning over for a kiss. Geralt gave up on his sulk and kissed him back, pushing his hands into Emhyr’s messy sleep-braid. 

“I should ask Yennefer to cut it,” Emhyr said, pushing his hair back from here it hung in his face.

“No,” Geralt murmured, kissing him again. “I like it.” 

He pulled Emhyr closer, and there was no more mention of haircuts—or anything else—for some time. 

  
  
  


Geralt was sewing along a seam of one of Ciri’s shirts, as he’d become her de facto seamstress at some point in the last few months. He wasn’t clear on how she’d torn it, she’d only offered it to him then twirled off outside, singing one of Jaskier’s bawdier tunes to herself. Why she was going outside in the middle of January, Geralt couldn’t imagine. It had sleeted that morning and Yen had blasted the frozen ground so she wouldn’t slip while going to check on the horses. The stables had remained cosy and warm so far, sometimes they seemed warmer than the palace itself. It was probably a safe guess that Pavetta liked horses. Or, it could be that Yen’s horse was in there, and Pavetta certainly seemed to favour Yen out of the three of them. Yen had mentioned last week that she’d been spending time in a solarium that apparently existed somewhere in the palace—he’d exchanged a long look with Jaskier behind her back. 

He and Jaskier had already agreed that if Pavetta ever hid the baths again they were going to riot. 

He pulled the last stitch tight, looping the thread around itself, tying it off and biting the thread to free the needle, but managed to drop it onto the tiles of one of the inner rooms they had taken over once the entrance hall had started to get too cold. It was just off the orangery, and therefore much warmer than anywhere else in the palace, save the baths in the cellar. The warm tiles helped not at all as Geralt kneeled on them, searching for the needle. Thread they had plenty of, but only a few needles and they couldn’t afford to lose one. 

It seemed to have disappeared, which was a theme in the palace. Only yesterday Geralt had gone to put on his favourite shirt and found it gone. Yen had wondered aloud if Ciri had mistaken it for rags and used it to wipe down the horses. 

Geralt sat back on his heels, about to give up when a small, five-petalled purple flower pushed its way up from between the cracks in the tiles. Geralt blinked at it in surprise.

“Hello?” 

A foot away, another one appeared, raising its purple and yellow head a few inches from the floor. Then another and another, leading out of the room and into the hallway. It was Bittersweet: every part of it was poisonous. 

Geralt checked around him to make sure there wasn’t someone else Pavetta was trying to communicate with, but it was just him, so he got to his feet and followed the flowers. 

They led into the next room, the thick wooden floorboards in the hallway doing nothing to discourage their growth, where a staircase now stood. Geralt had never seen a staircase in the day. Jaskier had mused that the second floor disappeared entirely at sunrise along with its inhabitants, but he’d heard Ciri running up and down stairs during the day, so it was there, they just weren’t welcome at any time before midnight.

The Bittersweet wound up and over the bottom step, like a delicate carpet laid out in welcome. Geralt thought about turning back the way he’d come. This was unlikely to be Emhyr’s doing, and therefore unlikely to be his decision. If Emhyr had wanted him to know what happened to him during the day he would have just told him. 

The flowers continued to creep up the stairs, slowly covering them with a dusting of purple and yellow. He looked at them a moment more, then climbed to the top as he had done every evening for the last two months. 

In the sunlight the neglect was more obvious: peeling wallpaper and damp spots that otherwise would go unnoticed in the glow of a witchlight or an oil lamp. The footprints in the dust were the same though and Geralt went to the door of the library, his mind as clear as it was before a kill: the knowledge that something was waiting for him behind the familiar door.

The thing that sat in Emhyr’s chair was grotesque: a parody of animal and human yet straying too far from either. Spines pushed through rough skin with a ring of dried blood around each; when it looked up the eyes were red rimmed and unfocused; its hands were more claw than anything and, judging from the terrible state of the book it held, ill-suited for grasping or holding. Its breath wheezed in and out, and a torn blanket sat in its lap as if to preserve whatever modesty was left to it.

And, of course, it was Emhyr. 

“I’m sorry,” Geralt said.

“Do you think I want your pity?” Emhyr spat, leaning forward in his seat so that his book fell from his precarious grip to land on the floor.

Geralt took a step to retrieve it for him.

“Leave it!” Emhyr ordered. “Leave me, I cannot bear to look at you,” he snarled, pulling his ragged blanket closer to him with one paw.

Geralt hesitated, then took a step back, then another. Emhyr remained where he was, sat as far back in the chair as he could get.

He said nothing, so Geralt turned and went back the way he had come, back down the worn stairs and into the sunlit garden. 

  
  
  


“A monster?” Jaskier said. “Are you sure it was Emhyr?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He was reading a collected works of Elven poetry.”

“No, that definitely sounds like Emhyr.”

They sat for a while, Jaskier gradually destroying the dandelion he’d picked. The cold was having no effect on the flowers.

‘And you didn’t know?” Jaskier added.

Geralt shook his head. 

“I knew there was something.”

Jaskier snorted. 

“We all knew there was something, Geralt. We’ve been here for eight months and he has never appeared during the day. I thought maybe he became a part of the palace, like a chair or a book or something.” 

Geralt turned from his contemplation of the courtyard to look at Jaskier.

“What?” Jaskier asked. “Anything seems possible in this place.” 

“A chair?”

“That was Yen’s suggestion.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Okay, no it wasn’t, but it doesn’t make it any less legitimate just because it was mine.” 

It was utterly ridiculous, but Jaskier usually was. And it never failed to make Geralt feel better. 

Geralt knocked their shoulders together.

“Where’s Yen?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I thought she was with Ciri, but I couldn’t find her either. She disappears more and more, Yen that is. She says there’s a solarium at the top of the palace, but I’ve never seen it.”

“Hmm.”

Jaskier went to pick another dandelion, having shredded the last one to nothing, but the flowers leant out of the way when he reached for one. He gave up. 

“What will you do? About Emhyr?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whatever it is, Yen can fix it.”

Geralt sighed. As much as he had faith in Yen’s creative problem solving, he couldn’t be sure that the curse was separate to whatever Pavetta had done, although it would make more sense for it to be something else altogether. If they were linked, then Emhyr’s curse would last as long as Pavetta’s did, and they hadn’t had much luck so far in undoing whatever she’d done, even with her help. 

He had a feeling though that Emhyr’s curse predated the Palace: Emhyr had survived the coup that had taken his father’s life, but Geralt would have been surprised if he’d survived it unscathed. 

A very old curse then, with a long time to become habit, as magic liked to do. That’s why everyone was always so afraid of the old curses, of the place in the forest where the massacre had been: magic remembered. Sometimes Geralt looked at the Watcher’s Towers and reminded himself that in a hundred, two hundred years they would be nothing but rubble: another dark place where no-one ventured. 

He sat with Jaskier all afternoon, half-listening as he sang about some long-ago battle, his fingers nimble on his lute. He couldn’t think of the look on Emhyr’s face: the betrayal. He knew he shouldn’t have invaded Emhyr’s privacy like that, and yet he’d done it anyway.

“What does Bittersweet mean?” he asked abruptly. 

Jaskier paused, placing his hand over his strings to still a discordant note.

“The flower?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. ‘Truth’ I think.” 

Geralt nodded distractedly, and Jaskier resumed his playing: something softer and quieter than before. Geralt looked up at the thick stone walls of the palace and wondered what Pavetta had thought she was doing.

“It wasn’t your secret to share,” he murmured.

If Jaskier heard him, he said nothing.

Yen joined them eventually, wearing yet another dress she’d found. It was easy to forget that when they’d met she’d worn silk and velvet as intricate as anything Jaskier favoured, whatever she said of her disinterest in fashion. In the last ten years they’d all had to blend in a lot more than they were used to. Another sacrifice that he hadn’t noticed until there was no need for it. 

He’d thought about not telling Yen—he’d only told Jaskier because, well, he’d needed to tell someone. It wasn’t his secret to share, except it was because he and Emhyr were… something, and it could be the piece of the jigsaw they were missing: the thing Yen needed to undo the spell Pavetta had made. 

He didn’t get a chance to make a decision, as when Yen sat down an abundance of flowers threw themselves up, from between the grass and moss, unfurling so fast Geralt thought he could hear them growing.

“What—” Yen started, a look of concentration on her face as she glanced at each flower that grew and then began to wilt and die, all within the span of moments. “Deception? Truth? Forgiveness? Did something happen?” She directed the last towards Jaskier and Geralt.

“Emhyr is cursed to turn into a monster, Pavetta made sure I found out.”

“Again?” Yen asked the air around them, and the flowers again began to sprout up: some near Geralt and some further towards the palace.

“I see,” Yen said, for all the world as if she were carrying on a conversation. “She says that Emhyr deceived her and it destroyed her love for him, but because you know the truth you… well. Tarragon means ‘lasting interest’.”

“You got all that from some flowers?”

“Snapdragon, deception; tansy, hostility; willow, sadness; bittersweet, truth; tarragon, lasting interest,” Yen listed the flowers, ticking them off on her fingers as she did so. “Those that grew close to you represent yourself, and those which grow near the palace are for Pavetta.”

Geralt had been imagining that Ciri and Yen spoke to Pavetta via some complex spell, not _flowers_. 

“How did you think they were speaking to each other?” Jaskier asked.

“She had no right to show me,” he told Yen, ignoring Jaskier’s question.

A many-headed purple flower unfurled by his knee, its leaves verdant even among so much other greenery.

“Hyacinth, a request for forgiveness,” Yen said. 

Geralt shook his head at the flower.

“It’s not just my forgiveness you need,” he told it. 

“Do I get a flower?” Jaskier asked and no flowers grew, but instead a delicate web of soft green leaves, so fine that they looked as if they could be woven into cloth. The gave off a clean, strong smell, like something one might find in a healer’s kitchen.

“Southernwood: constancy, humour,” Yen told him, her smile soft.

“Thank you,” Jaskier told it, stroking a hand over the fine leaves. “And Geralt?”

The flowers that crowded by Geralt were so yellow they looked unnatural, with a wide black centre and narrow petals.

“Black-eyed susans?” Jaskier asked Yen, who nodded.

“Justice,” she added.

“And what does Yen get?”

A whole bouquet erupted around her, which she named and gave their meanings as they bloomed: thyme, for courage and strength; calla lily for beauty, yellow jasmine for grace, dill for power, specifically against evil; and amaryllis for pride.

“Well, you can’t say she doesn’t know you well,” Jaskier said, eyeing the wide pink and white amaryllis. 

“Can you break the curse? Emhyr’s curse?” Geralt specified.

Yet more flowers grew around Yen: these looked like a smaller flower within larger red petals.

“Pavetta says no,” she replied. “Columbines mean foolishness, or folly.”

“So we’re back to breaking Pavetta’s spell.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Yen was not one to apologise, but Geralt found he couldn’t take it graciously.

“It’s fine,” he told her, and stood to go back into the palace. 

Unfortunately, there was nothing to distract him from his thoughts, and he wandered round and round the corridors until, at last, the clock struck midnight. 

Emhyr was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

“I’d rather not discuss it,” he said and, as Geralt could think of no comfort he could give, he nodded his agreement.

It was only later, once they were lying in bed together, did Geralt feel it was safe to edge a little closer to the topic.

“What was Pavetta like when she—you know?” he asked, throwing an arm in the air to indicate _when she wasn’t a palace_.

Emhyr opened one eye and looked at him before closing it again.

“She was beautiful,” he finally decided.

“And?” Geralt prompted, when Emhyr seemed like he was going to leave it at that.

“And she was loyal and kind and had a temper like a storm at sea.” 

“And was one of the most powerful sorceresses in the last thousand years.”

“Well, she never mentioned that.”

Geralt snorted. 

“You really didn’t know?”

“I had no idea,” Emhyr said, and Geralt thought that was perhaps the end of the conversation, but after a few beats he continued. “I was cursed before, when I knew her: the Usurper, of course. I’m not sure she even knew the extent of her powers. I believe—I hope—that if she had known she would have tried to lift my curse.”

Geralt turned to him and put an arm around his waist.

“She would’ve,” Geralt confirmed.

“So sure.”

He shrugged. 

“She loved you: if she had known the extent of her powers, she would have tried to lift your curse.”

Emhyr was quiet for a long time, long enough that Geralt thought perhaps he’d fallen asleep but then he spoke again.

“How are you so confident?” he asked.

“Pavetta had never been trained, perhaps had no idea of the scale of her powers. Whatever she did, it was some combination of desperation and her deepest wish: for you and her unborn child to be safe. She must have loved you, Emhyr. Her spell wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t.”

Emhyr made no response, but Geralt hadn’t really expected one. Still, he waited until his breaths evened out into sleep before he allowed himself to close his eyes and rest.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I agree with Jaskier

Geralt thought of all those dying in the fires while he laughed with Ciri; ate with his friends; and lay safe in his lover’s arms. Witchers—hunted as they had once hunted down monsters. His brothers, those alive and those murdered in the flames. Yen’s sisters; the mages and hedge witches; the midwives who could barely use a flicker of magic: all consumed by the fear of one man. 

The Emperor wasn’t the first tyrant whose rule Geralt had lived under, and each time he had told himself that old lie: it was not his place to interfere. With the distance of time and the space to think—beyond the daily grind of staying alive and fed—he couldn’t help but question what he’d been taught. Why kill one kind of monster, yet let the greater monster walk free? There were times when it was hard to say who deserved a swift sword as a means of justice, but surely burning people alive by their thousands was as clear an evil as could be. 

Even if it weren’t, there were no Schools, no Councils, no-one to say what he could and could not do. 

He’d last seen Eskel a year ago. He’d been travelling with a half-elf and her child, who’d called Eskel _papa_ , then hid her face in her mother’s clothes. Geralt had been shocked to the core, but Eskel had shaken his head. Not his child by birth then, but his none-the-less. Geralt had been happy for him—was still happy for him. Eskel was quick and deadly and loyal: he would know how to keep his family safe.

Lambeth, he had neither seen nor heard of for a decade. 

It was March, and the lengthening days reminded him of saying his goodbyes at the gates of Kaer Morhen, snowbells shivering in the wind. He hadn’t been back there for six years.

The palace was warm enough, with fires in the grates of each room and a never-ending supply of wood in the woodshed. He’d taken to sparring with Emhyr most days, although their bouts usually ended with more kissing than was traditional. Yen and Jaskier were both happy to fight with him on occasion and Ciri, who sometimes moved so fast she appeared as if she were in two places at once, was always delighted to have a sword in her hands. 

At that moment Ciri was supposed to be having a singing lesson, however he couldn’t hear her. What he could hear was the angry steps of both Jaskier and Yen coming towards him. He braced himself as they came through the door, Jaskier first with Yen at his elbow.

“Geralt, tell Yennefer that—”

“Nope,” Geralt interrupted, continuing to peel the potatoes he was preparing for later. 

“You cannot usurp me just because your girlfriend doesn’t feel like speaking to you today!” Jaskier yelled, turning back to Yen.

Geralt tuned them out, raising an eyebrow at Ciri who was loitering in the doorway.

She shrugged and offered him a smile, so at least she wasn’t bothered by the argument taking place at an increasing volume in front of her. 

“You’re no longer a professor and this isn’t your university!” 

Geralt winced, his sensitive ears protesting.

“Right!” Geralt shouted over them, “Ciri is helping me with dinner. You two fu—go away and cool off. Preferably somewhere on the other side of the palace to me.”

“I’m going to the solarium,” Yen announced, after a tense pause.

She swept regally out of the room, aided by the heavy court dress she wore. 

Jaskier gave Ciri a deep bow that made her giggle, then also left.

“Come on, you can use one of the knives from over there,” he told Ciri, gesturing to a thick block of wood that bristled with kitchen tools. “Mind your fingers,” he added.

Jaskier always refused to peel any vegetables, for fear he would slip and end his ability to play. Well that was the excuse he used, anyhow. 

Ciri was quieter than usual, not even humming to herself, but she proclaimed she was fine when he mentioned it.

“Do I want to know what that was all about?” he asked after they’d finished peeling the potatoes and had moved onto the carrots.

“Jaskier thought I had a singing lesson, Yen thought I had magic training.”

“They both love spending time with you,” he told her, and was rewarded with her bright smile.

“Yes, I know.”

They had enough carrots to feed them all three times over by the time they stopped. Geralt had decided to keep going until he was sure there would be peace.

“If you marry my father, may I call you papa?” Ciri asked suddenly, ploughing on without waiting for a reply. “And perhaps I could call Yen mama as well? Then I would have two of each, which only seems fair. Jaskier says that because I’ve been alone for so long, I should have whatever I wish.”

“And what would Jaskier be?” Geralt asked, dealing with the only part of that he could.

“My uncle. Or my best friend—I’ve never had one and Jaskier says that friendship is the highest form of love. Do you think he’d say yes? If I asked him to be my best friend?”

“I’m sure he’d be honoured,” Geralt replied and meant, _I would be honoured_. 

Ciri leant briefly against his side and Geralt felt that maybe she’d understood. 

“Shall we go see if they’re still arguing?” he asked her, and she jumped up, spilling peelings all over the floor.

“Mother!” she called, and vines crept from between the flagstones and pulled the mess they’d made back into the cracks of the floor to Melitele knew where. “Okay, let’s go,” she added, running off down the corridor.

Geralt followed at a more sedate pace. If they ever got out of there, the first thing he was going to do was teach her how to use a broom.

  
  
  


“Yen thinks she is close to understanding the spell,” Geralt told Emhyr, later that day. The curtains in the library were closed against the sun, trapping enough warmth so that for the first time since November the fire was not lit. 

“Has she had some breakthrough?” 

His speech was a little slurred through his sharp teeth, but understandable. It had taken just over a month before Emhyr would agree to spend time with Geralt while he wore his curse, and then longer again for him to speak to him as easily as he did when he was human. 

“I’m not sure,” Geralt hesitated, not sure if his theories would be welcome or not, but Emhyr was looking at him expectantly. “I get the impression that it’s less to do with her skills in magic, and more to do with her connection to Pavetta.”

“Any my curse with it?” he asked, his hands tightening on the book in his lap.

“Neither of them are sure, as it predates Pavetta’s spell.” 

Emhyr stood abruptly, casting his book aside with violence. 

“Do they think I can rule like this?” he spat.

“Emhyr, I think their priority is to free us—to free Ciri, who has never known anything other than these walls.”

“And you think I care nothing for my daughter?” Emhyr demanded.

Geralt stood, taking a slow step towards him.

“I didn’t say that.” 

“I am a monster, it is only fitting I should think like one.”

“That’s not true, Emhyr, and you know it.”

“I do not know if I wish for freedom for my only child or to slake my thirst for revenge or so that I may sit on the throne and be called Emperor. That should be an easy choice, but it is not. What does that make me, if not a monster?”

“Human,” Geralt told him, then placed a hand on the rough hide of his face and kissed him.

Emhyr brought his own clawed hand up and covered Geralt’s with his own.

“You know, in all the stories the curse is lifted by a kiss,” Emhyr told him.

“It’s a shame this isn’t a story.”

“Yes, a terrible shame. And because it is no story we will die here. All of us, die in a bed of flowers, surrounded by stone that is alive but cannot speak.” 

“Then we will die here,” Geralt said, fatalistically. “Do you think you’re the only one who has a purpose outside these walls?”

Emhyr scoffed. “You fight mindless monsters while the most vile of all sits upon a throne and burns people by the thousands. You scrabble at its feet while I would take its head and end this terror.”

“All to put yourself in his place,” Geralt sneered. He’d heard the words a hundred times, about how little good Witchers did, but somehow Emhyr’s words hurt more.

Emhyr drew himself up, his spines undulating in a wave.

“It is my right to do so, one that my father died for. I am Emperor, and Cirilla will follow me to the throne. _That_ is our destiny, not to die here, unnamed in history.”

Geralt shook his head and took a step back. The idea of Emhyr in that snake pit, trying to catch up on forty years of history while nobles stood at his back, knives at the ready—the terrible scars he’d worn since his father had been murdered were testament to the risk. Worse, the idea of _Ciri_ there. 

“And so you counsel me to what?” Emhyr continued. “Turn my back so that he might strike me anew? Make peace with the man who cursed me and tried to murder Pavetta, tried to murder my unborn child?”

“No. No, of course not. I would hold him down while you cleaved his head from his neck—sometimes there can be no forgiveness, sometimes the answer to violence can only be violence. It is the rest I could not be part of, that I wouldn’t want you or Ciri to be part of: to be Emperor opens you up for this to happen again, an endless struggle for the right to rule.”

“You think we should leave the Continent to chaos?”

“No, I think there will always be someone looking to take power and that even now there will be those better suited to it. We should let them.”

“I thought Witchers were famous for their impartiality.”

Geralt looked to the window, where the sunlight crept from around the edges of the heavy drapes.

“I thought what we were doing was the only good we could do: helping those we could, when we could. I thought that it was just the nature of people, that it was inevitable that there would be times in history where people were murdered in droves and times when they weren’t: like the turning of a great, unforgiving wheel.”

“And now?” Emhyr prompted.

“All things have a beginning, and all things have an end. Here, this place, formed part of the beginning of this horror at this time—for no reason other than a murder’s fear of retribution for his crimes. It just takes some courage to see the end, to be part of that end. To end suffering isn’t political, it isn’t a moral stance, it just _is_.”

“Then you agree to do what must be done.”

“Yes: but only what must be done, and then we can be free to do and be whoever we wish, with whoever we wish.”

Emhyr looked around the room. It looked shabbier in day: dust and rot, books with torn covers and broken spines.

“You would ask so much of me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For Ciri. For me... For love.”

The air between them remained tense for a long moment, then Emhyr bent his head forward, his spines falling flat once more. 

“Yes. Yes, for Cirilla and for you. I would give up my throne.”

Geralt reached for him and they kissed. He felt like they had sealed a promise, that some weight had lifted from the room when Emhyr had agreed that he would not be Emperor, that he would not force that path upon Ciri. 

“Forgive me, I did not mean to say that what you did was…” Emhyr started, pulling away a little.

“Meaningless? Don’t worry, many have said the same.”

“But I do not want to be one of them: it was said in anger, in fear. I did not mean it.”

Geralt had thought worse about himself, so he could hardly bear a grudge against Emhyr for saying what he had often believed. 

He kissed Emhyr again instead of saying any of that, hoping his actions would convey when he couldn't put into words. 

“I’ve been alone for so long, perhaps I imagined you.” Emhyr murmured, into the warm space between them. “It would make more sense that this, I think.”

Geralt brought Emhyr’s hand up to his mouth and kissed his spine-covered knuckles. 

“I’m here.”

“How long for? Perhaps Yennefer’s answer to the riddle of this place means that I must stay here.” 

“I won’t leave without you, without any of you,” Geralt promised him, but Emhyr seemed lost to his own imagined grief. 

“Emhyr,” Geralt said, and drew his close so that their foreheads touched. “I am here, I am.” 

Emhyr sighed, and brought his hands up to grip Geralt’s shoulders. He was stronger like this, but Geralt didn’t care. It was a comfort to hold on and be held in return.

“Yes. Yes I believe you are. And Cirilla, my bright Cirilla who has never flinched from me. Pavetta, who comforted me when I had lost all hope of it. And you. You love me when I had given up on having anything at all for myself.” 

As he spoke bluebells sprung up around his feet, their roots spreading across the wooden floor. They both watched in wonder as they spread like a wave of blue, until the floor was invisible and the air was heavy with their scent.

“Pavetta?” Geralt asked, and the flowers shivered in reply.

Emhyr laughed, a strange sound from his animal throat, as the flowers grew up to their knees and they had to wade through them, Geralt smiling at the ridiculousness of it, trying to find the books they had discarded among all the blue and green.

  
  
  


The light spilled between the curtains, and Geralt stared confused at strange white flowers, nodding joyously in a breeze he couldn’t feel. They had pointed petals that looked like they were covered in fur and the centre held a number of yellow florets. His botany had improved leaps and bounds recently, but he was sure he’d never seen their like before. 

Judging from the quality of light, he’d slept much longer than usual: from early last night till past nine at least. He stretched, freezing as he realised that there was someone behind him, and he turned quickly. It was only Emhyr though, breathing softly in the morning light. 

Then he realised and held his breath, not quite believing what he saw. 

Emhyr was human. 

He lifted a hand to wake him, then hesitated. He looked older in the light, the sun catching on the grey. In reality he was still less than half Geralt’s age, and the deep lines around his mouth suited him. For all he pretended to be aloof, he laughed often enough for smile lines to have permanently creased the corners of his eyes. 

“Emhyr?” he said, and he hummed in response. 

“I thought you wanted me to get more sleep,” he grouched without opening his eyes. Then his hand flew his face and he looked, wide eyed at Geralt. 

“Am I—?” he started.

“Yes,” Geralt replied, his voice thick with emotion.

“There is a mirror in a trunk in the room on the left at the furthest end of the corridor, fetch it, if you please,” Emhyr demanded, his expression shuttering.

Geralt pulled on his shirt and trousers, padding barefoot to the room Emhyr had indicated, eager to prove what Emhyr was not letting himself believe. The flowers were already gone and he made a mental note to ask Yen their meaning when he next saw her.

By the time he got back Emhyr was up and dressed, he wasn’t pacing or anything so obvious, but every line of him was tight with tension. Geralt spun the mirror around to face him, and he stared at his reflection for a long time, one hand coming up to touch the silver in his hair. Geralt didn’t need to ask to know that he hadn’t looked in a mirror for a very long time.

“We should go find Ciri,” Geralt told him.

“No.”

“No?”

“Not until we know it’s permanent. It would be too cruel if it is only a temporary change.”

Geralt propped the mirror against the bed and finished getting dressed. Emhyr watched him carefully, and Geralt wanted socks on his feet before he started arguing about it. 

In the end, it didn’t take much convincing. Emhyr gave in easily enough that he must have wanted to tell her. 

“Father!” Ciri called the instant she saw him, and threw herself into Emhyr’s arms. 

He held her close and, with infinite care, placed a kiss on her sun-bright hair. 

“What did you do?” Jaskier asked, looking as amazed as Geralt felt. They must have been in the middle of a lesson, as they’d found them in the orangery and Jaskier still held his lute loosely in one hand. 

“I’m not sure.”

He had an idea that perhaps Emhyr had to give up his claim to the throne for the curse to be lifted, but it felt like something too private to share with Jaskier.

“Maybe it was your magic dick.” Jaskier suggested. 

Geralt hoped that Ciri and Emhyr, who were conversing quietly, were too far away to hear.

“You’re supposed to be the one with the magic dick.” Geralt replied, thinking of the sheer number of women who waved Jaskier off, misty-eyed, whenever they left a village or town they’d stayed in for more than a week.

“There’s nothing magic about a strap-on, Geralt, only skill.”

“Please stop thrusting.” 

“I was not—,” Jaskier started, but Geralt cut him off.

“Where’s Yen?” he asked, uneasy for no reason he could think of. 

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen her since breakfast. I’m sure Pavetta will share the news with her, wherever she is.”

There was still no sign of her two hours later, and the ground remained still when Ciri asked her mother if she’d seen her. Truly worried now, they searched the palace: Geralt and Emhyr first searching the upper floors, of which there were now two, and Ciri and Jaskier searching the ground floor and the cellar. 

“It is my fault,” Emhyr told him once they had checked all the rooms on both floors and found no trace of her. “It must have been some condition of my curse.”

“Emhyr, that makes no sense. You gave up the throne, your chance at a place in history: that’s what broke the curse.”

“I take it back,” Emhyr told the walls, as if he could undo whatever had taken Yen. “I will burn this world down if it means I am one day called Emperor.” 

“You don’t mean that.”

“Damn you,” Emhyr said, and pulled Geralt into his arms. “We will find her.”

They stayed like that for a moment, until Geralt heard Ciri shout from somewhere further in the palace. 

“Father! Geralt!” 

Ciri didn’t sound distressed, but Geralt took the stairs two at a time: first to the ground floor and then to the cellar. He stopped short, Emhyr just behind him, as he tried to orientate himself. There was a door to his left that he had never seen before that, if it matched the layout upstairs, would lead out into the courtyard, towards the stables. 

“Cirilla!” Emhyr called again, but it was Jaskier who replied, his voice coming from behind the new door. 

Geralt opened it carefully, but behind it was only a plain corridor, torches burning brightly in sconces spaced every five feet or so. The floor was trodden down earth, and there was no sign of either dust or flowers.

“I know this place,” Emhyr murmured.

They hurried onwards. The floor sloped slightly down and everything smelt of newly turned soil. They rounded a corner to discover Ciri and Jaskier waiting for them in front of another closed door.

“It won’t open,” Ciri told them.

Emhyr stepped in front of Geralt, who had been about to put his shoulder to it, and when he touched the handle the door swung inwards with no resistance. 

Three roughly cut stairs led down into a room bare of anything except an austere altar of some kind, that crouched, half sunken, into the dirt. Yen stood nearby, barefoot, her expression unfocussed. Jaskier stepped forward but Geralt caught him by the arm. 

“If she was in danger, don’t you think we’d know?” he asked, not wanting to interrupt whatever Yen was about. 

Jaskier looked closely at her, then stepped back next to Geralt. 

“You’re right. I think Pavetta would bring the palace down to protect her.” 

They all went down the three stairs together, but stayed well back from Yen.

Ciri inserted herself between Emhyr and Geralt, taking one of their hands in each of hers.

“She’s not going to hurt Mother, is she?” she asked, glancing at all three of them.

“Never,” Jaskier assured her. 

Yen walked slowly forwards, and at each step she took flowers erupted from the earth, bursting between her toes and brushing her ankles. They stayed as she moved forward, like living footprints. She knelt next to the stone altar and even more flowers sprung up, as if joyous in her presence: a riot of purple and red against the dark of the earth and her skin. 

She pushed at the stone overhang around the side and Geralt realised it was not an altar at all: it was a tomb. Ciri gasped, and Geralt held her hand tight as the lid fell to the side with a noise that vibrated through the ground, setting the flowers to tremble. 

Inside lay a woman, her features still, as if she slept. 

Emhyr had not overstated matters: Pavetta was beautiful. Her hair was golden to Ciri’s silver, and her fox-like features were as delicate as a painting. Her eyes were closed, but Geralt could see that she was breathing, shallowly.

Yen leant forward, down over the edge of the tomb, and placed a kiss on Pavetta’s lips.

There was a pause—during which Geralt had enough time to wonder if whatever magic had kept her alive had also kept her breath fresh—then Pavetta opened her eyes. 

Far above them, Geralt heard the sound of crumbling stone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bluebells, meaning lasting love, consistency
> 
> The white flower Geralt sees is Edelweiss, meaning courage/bravery
> 
> To everyone who guessed _Sleeping Beauty _: HOW DID YOU KNOW??? I honestly thought I was writing _Beauty and the Beast_ for most of this fic *shakes head* - you're all way more insightful than me.__
> 
> _  
> _Just the epilogue to go, which I'll post over the weekend :)_  
>  _


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, kudos'd, bookmarked or come to speak to me on tumblr about this fic <3

The real Morvran Voorhis, Geralt discovered, was more than worth his eight points in Gwent. He was related to Emhyr through a number of distant relatives, though he seemed to have lost out on the strong Emreis jawline. He had, however, inherited all the politicking skills of his forefathers and when Geralt, Emhyr and Yen arrived in Miatlas, cloaked and anonymous, it was to gradually realise that there was already an uprising on its way. All they had to do was hurry it along. 

Geralt even met him, once all the maiming and screaming was over and he was firmly on the throne. It was a private meeting, as one would expect when the current Emperor met a formerly-dead heir to his throne. An heir with a much stronger claim. Geralt had given up his swords about six reception rooms ago, but he’d remained aware of everything within reach he could use as a weapon, Yen fairly vibrating with suppressed magics by his side. 

Emhyr, for his part, had been calm and courteous. He had told Morvran that his father had renounced his own claim, and that of his line, and had done so with no hesitation in his lie. Geralt was sure he could never understand what it had cost him to dishonour his father’s sacrifice in such a way, but anyone who spent even a moment in Ciri’s company must know it to be a worthy sacrifice. 

Whether Morvran believed him or not there was no way to know, but he hadn’t ordered them all slaughtered or poisoned them at the first opportunity, so Geralt was counting that in his favour. 

Everyone agreed that it was better if Emhyr remained dead in the minds of the populace. No-one even mentioned Ciri. Being born out of wedlock would weaken her claim, but none of them were betting on that keeping her safe. Better that Morvran never be aware of her existence. And, should he investigate further, he would find a young woman who looked wholly like her mother and who referred to four people as her parents.

They settled not far from Dol Blathanna, which Morvran had made a protectorate under the rule of Queen Gleanna: one of a handful high-powered survivors of the purges. Yen knew her well enough to ensure they were on good terms with the elves that lived in and around the area, and of course, both Ciri and Emhyr spoke perfect Elder Speech. 

Geralt worried that Emhyr would regret his decision, that he would see the world turning without him and wish to be more fully a part of it. After agonising over the idea for a month, he finally spoke to Emhyr about it, who admitted he’d worried about the same for Geralt. 

“Maybe we could try talking next time, eh?” Geralt asked, trying to make light of the whole thing.

Emhyr raised an eyebrow, then went back to the book he was reading. Instead of being tired of books he seemed to be trying to consume the entire last four decades’ worth of published material in as fast a time as possible. Geralt was slightly worried about what would happen when he finished: a bored Emhyr with a whole world to explore sounded like a recipe for disaster. 

“Are you sure?” Geralt asked after Emhyr had turned another page. “We could go anywhere, we don’t have to stay here. I know you wanted more than this narrow existence. You wanted to be Emperor.”

“And we shall travel, no doubt, once the Path calls to you once more. But you were right: I do not need an Empire—not for myself and not for Cirilla.” Emhyr said, not looking up from his book. “I am content with this small kingdom.”

Geralt was debating whether to do something Emhyr would raise an eyebrow at him for, like kiss his forehead, when he heard running steps behind him.

“Father! Papa!” Ciri yelled at the top of her not inconsiderable lung capacity. A flock of nearby crows took flight, startling into the blue sky. “A letter arrived from Uncle Jaskier! He said I have a place at the University if I want it! I can study!”

“Congratulations, Cirilla. Have you told your mother yet? She will be pleased as well.”

Pavetta meant to travel, she had said as much, but had decided to stay until Ciri was ready to leave on her own path. 

“Oh no, I was going to tell her but I think she and mama are, er busy. I can tell them later.”

Geralt made a mental note to stay out of the house for the next hour. It wasn’t that either Yen or Pavetta were loud, it was more that, on occasion, something would explode. Pavetta had assured everyone that she was working on controlling her magic.

“Have you decided what to study?” he asked Ciri, who was bouncing on her toes in excitement. 

“No, there are so many subjects to choose from: music and song; literature, politics, the healing arts. What do you think I should choose, Father?”

“Anything you wish, my daughter,” Emhyr told her. “Anything you wish.”


End file.
